Unreal Engine 5 Demo Shows the Stunning Future of Video Game Graphics (vice.com) 122
Epic Games' Unreal is already one of the most widely used game engines on the planet, utilized by game developers, advertisers and filmmakers alike. And it's ready to take the next step. From a report: Epic Games announced its new Unreal Engine 5 today and we finally have an idea of what graphics will look like on next generation hardware. The first gameplay footage from Microsoft's Xbox Series X was underwhelming, but the first run of games on new hardware typically is. The nine minutes of footage from Epic, which is running a tech demo on PlayStation 5 hardware, offered our first real glimpse of what may be the future of video game visuals. The clip features a video game protagonist exploring a cave system then skysurfing through a mountain pass as ruins crumble around her. Epic designed it to showcase two new features of Unreal Engine 5 -- nanite and lumen. Epic Games says that nanite allows game designers to render an incredible amount of polygons on screen, leading to photo-realistic environments. Lumen is a new lighting engine that renders light and fills space similarly to Nvidia's RTX tech.
In the demo, the two new technologies add up to a beautiful scene with complicated textures, animation, and lighting. Epic Games is selling these new technologies, and Unreal Engine 5 in general, as tools developers can use to save time in the development process. According to Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5 comes with a suite of tools that allow developers to rely less on hand crafting environments and animations. The demo is gorgeous, but it doesn't show off the developer's version of the software and it's hard to know what the software will look like for its target audience -- people making video games.
In the demo, the two new technologies add up to a beautiful scene with complicated textures, animation, and lighting. Epic Games is selling these new technologies, and Unreal Engine 5 in general, as tools developers can use to save time in the development process. According to Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5 comes with a suite of tools that allow developers to rely less on hand crafting environments and animations. The demo is gorgeous, but it doesn't show off the developer's version of the software and it's hard to know what the software will look like for its target audience -- people making video games.
Is it much better than PC graphics? (Score:2)
I'm a little confused on why what is possible with the next generation of Playstation / XBox would be revolutionary in any way. Wouldn't it still be on par or even worse than top of the line PCs today? Is this a situation where the publishers aren't pushing PC graphics because of catering to the lowest denominator, or am I missing something here? (this isn't an area of specialty for me, so that is very possible)
Re:Is it much better than PC graphics? (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt there's gong to be anything revolutionary. The consoles do have efficiency and optimization advantages, but they always look impressive right up until they're actually released with real games. By then the PC hadrware has caught up, and the most impressive stuff that was shown own turns out to be, if not pre-rendered, then heavily optimized and limited scale tech demos.
The biggest change is probably that this will get developers to step up their game, as PC ports often get limited by the consoles' performance. So on one hand I'm glad Doom Eternal ran perfectly smoothly on my 8 year old i5-3470 system, but on the other hand it's quite disappointing that it's not meaningfully different from its 4 year old predecessor. This isn't something you'd see in the 90s :(
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That's a Doom Eternal issue. It's not expected to see major advancements in a game that is based around fast paced action. Compare it to say Battlefield V's release which not only is beautiful compared to the previous title in the series, but on release brought high end systems to their knees (though has been optimised since then).
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Did you not play Doom II?
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iD were never that good at making the most of their own engines. Carmack was a brilliant engine developer, and Romero was a great level designer, but iD games were never the most impressive use of the iD engines. "Doom 1.5" games were often far more impressive than Doom itself, exemplified by Heretic. It was the same with the Doom II engine. Doom II itself had some brilliant level design and a provided a lot of fun. It gave true 3D environments with multiple areas above each other active at the same ti
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Yeah of course but it came out jus a year after the first game, not 4.
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The advancements are in two areas:
1) Software - New algorithms using things like neural networks and similar tools to accelerate or find alternate approaches that where heretofore unattainable (Things like real-time de-noising for ray-tracing or DLSS)
2) Hardware - These kinds of algorithms need new types of hardware to be able to execute them at effective framerates. This hardware is available for very high-end PCs, but it's not available on the console hardware that exists today (you might be able to do so
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Q: Is this a slide show?
A: No, it's Unreal 5 running on hardware dating from before 2022.
Re:Is it much better than PC graphics? (Score:5, Informative)
I watched the demo. At least to me, the most revolutionary things they were talking about were workflow improvements over Unreal Engine 4, rather than technical accomplishments in the engine's fidelity. For instance, instead of needing to import models from CAD software and then do optimizations to get them running at the desired framerates, UE5 can now handle that work automatically. You feed your film-quality 3D model directly into UE5 and it'll figure out where to trim polygons to make things work. Likewise, instead of needing to manually do a lot of work to make lighting look good on models, UE5 can automatically do much of that work, saving your artists and world designers that much more time to focus on things that matter. Similarly, the engine now supports context-aware animations and the like (the example they showed was a character automatically placing her hand on a door as she walked by it), which means that you can have your characters move through the world in a much more natural way without needing to put in the work doing custom animations and the like.
By and large, these sorts of improvements raise the floor for what we can expect, rather than raising the ceiling. Up to now, only the most dedicated studios with an eye to detail and deep pockets to match could put in the work necessary to do those custom animations, get lighting looking that good, and still maintain decent framerates. These upgrades bring that functionality to the masses. But in terms of pushing what's possible, you're right that this demo didn't do much...with one possible exception: global illumination. While they never said the words "ray tracing", they did demonstrate global illumination, which, if implemented with ray tracing, would mean that we are finally seeing ray tracing being delivered to the masses as well. Having ray tracing on consoles should finally help push adoption of it across the gaming industry.
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As the demo showed, though, dynamic polygon optimization means that your film-quality 3D model is going to look film-quality even when you're standing right next to it, while the next moment you can have the camera pan across a whole room filled with copies of that model, all with that same detail level, without overwhelming the rendering engine.
If you have to optimize the model before it goes into the engine, there's going to be a point where either the model's too low res or too high res to work as well f
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At least to me, the most revolutionary things they were talking about were workflow improvements
You watched a different demo than we did. The demo was showing changes dynamically occurring in the game, not simply optimising the workflow of some developer pre-compile time decision. The demo also specifically pointed out the ability to render shittonnes more polygons in real time than in the past while providing dynamic GI to them as well. They specifically pointed out that level of detail was being rendered on the screen in realtime, not that it was some optimisation workflow.
By and large, these sorts of improvements raise the floor for what we can expect, rather than raising the ceiling.
And that's a strange comme
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I think you and I agree about the facts of what was presented. Where we differ is in how we interpret those facts.
The demo was [...] not simply optimising the workflow of some developer pre-compile time decision.
Agreed, and I think this speaks to a misunderstanding between us. When I said "the most revolutionary things they were talking about were workflow improvements", I was getting at the idea that they removed the costly grunt work that has been necessary until to now to implement these technologies, thus putting them within reach of all developers. I was not suggesting the "workflow improvements" w
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The vast majority of money in AAA games comes from consoles, so they drive the market. The major game engines base their feature set off what the consoles can do.
PC games generally get what the consoles get, but running at a higher quality level. You'll get more polygons, larger textures, more lights on PC, but they'll all be running off the same engine tech as the consoles.
The big jumps in engine tech happen when new console hardware comes out. You're getting a big jump in memory & processing power for
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You got that precisely backwards. Console technology gets driven by what happens on PC, and engine tech is driven by PC hardware capabilities and then filtered down to consoles. This demo here is no different and the new features in the Unreal Engine which have been displayed here boil down to:
a) things that are capable without special purpose hardware but rather very powerful hardware on PCs already.
b) things that require special purpose hardware which PCs already have but the PS5 and Xbox Series X are onl
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Yes, the hardware gets driven on the PC side, where you can sell small numbers of units at very high prices. Then it filters down from there.
But you can't design your engines around $2000 video cards. Those sales are easy money for the graphics card manufacturers, but they represent a tiny percent of the market for games. The vast majority of game sales happen on consoles, so the big engines design around them first.
The planning stages for a new console go back several years. 2017 was when Microsoft and Son
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I'm a little confused on why what is possible with the next generation of Playstation / XBox would be revolutionary in any way. Wouldn't it still be on par or even worse than top of the line PCs today?
Actually based on the performance numbers published so far it looks like an Xbox may out perform a 2080 Ti in terms of TFlops, and I can't remember the PS5's figures but I bet they are similar. The open questions are:
a) can anyone make use of it to achieve amazing graphics, or is it just good in generating marketing numbers, and
b) given the hardware is made by PC graphics companies, what will the PC look like when these systems actually hit the market. The Xbox is slated to make current generation graphics
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I'm a little confused on why what is possible with the next generation of Playstation / XBox would be revolutionary in any way. Wouldn't it still be on par or even worse than top of the line PCs today?
Actually based on the performance numbers published so far it looks like an Xbox may out perform a 2080 Ti in terms of TFlops, and I can't remember the PS5's figures but I bet they are similar. The open questions are:
a) can anyone make use of it to achieve amazing graphics, or is it just good in generating marketing numbers, and
b) given the hardware is made by PC graphics companies, what will the PC look like when these systems actually hit the market. The Xbox is slated to make current generation graphics cards obsolete, but then NVIDIA has leaked out information about the Amper architecture which based on *their* marketing bullshit will mean the PC remains the king even when the Xbox does hit, since presumably it's expected the 30X0 series GPUs will hit the market earlier than the holiday season.
What has really changed is the strategy around console hardware. It used to be that the brand new console in the store had previous gen tech in it compared to PCs. The simple reason is that previous gen technology is cheaper, keeping the costs down. And consoles were aimed at teens and young adults who had to convince their parents to buy them the gaming systems. Today, a lot of adults are gamers and are willing to spend the extra money for current gen tech.
As for where PC graphics go from here, they co
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What's also interesting is that no matter how far video processing has come, there is still a long way to go to achieve realistic real-time immersive VR.
That's definitely not my experience with my Index, or anyone I know who has used it.
I'd try some high end VR, and spend less time reading white papers that talk about what's theoretically needed for perfection.
VR is highly immersive.
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It used to be that the brand new console in the store had previous gen tech in it compared to PCs.
That hasn't been true since the first xbox. For the past 15 years consoles have very much been "current gen" tech, just highly customised and built down to a price. Going forward is not going to change much. As I said the numbers look impressive for something that hasn't launched, but then we're expecting another generation of graphics card announcements as well as another CPU generation to be released before these consoles hit the market. This is really no different to the state of the Xbox 360 or PS3 a ye
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Actually based on the performance numbers published so far it looks like an Xbox may out perform a 2080 Ti in terms of TFlops
Nope.
2080Ti: 14.2
XBox Series X: 12
PS5: 10.28
It has however a massive generational improvement for both consoles. Where previously their graphics capabilities were laughably bad, they're now on par with high-end PCs.
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Apologies I was thinking of 2080 Super numbers. (11 TFlops).
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Re:Is it much better than PC graphics? (Score:5, Informative)
> Wouldn't it still be on par or even worse than top of the line PCs today?
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: Some is on par, some is (allegedly) better (SSD), some is worse.
Consoles traditionally are "bringing up the rear", aka last year's high end PC. That is, consoles are raising the bottom of the bar, by
a) standardizing hardware features, and
b) raising expectations of software features / performance.
i.e. Raytracing hardware, such as nVidia RTX, has been available on PC for over a few years. [nvidia.com]. Next gen is the first time it will be standardized on consoles.
If you want specific details on the previous generation see Eighth generation of video game consoles [wikipedia.org]. Here is a summary comparing what last gen consoles brought to the table versus next gen:
=== CPU ===
Last Gen: 4 core / 8 Threads
Next Gen: 8 core / 16 Threads
=== GPU ===
Last Gen: Software: Dynamic resolution, Adaptive framerates, Hardware: Checkerboard rendering [wikipedia.org]
Next Gen: Hardware: Real-time Raytracing
Last Gen: 4K at 60 Hz
Next Gen: 4K at 120 Hz
== RAM ===
Last Gen: 8 GB GDDR5
Next Gen: 16 GB GDDR6
=== Hard Drive ===
Last Gen: Crappy 5200 RPM drive, stock was 500 GB at time of launch.
Next Gen: NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, 1 TB (*)
(*) 825 GB on PS5
Basically, consoles today are a poorman's closed-off high end PC. For their price:performance ratio consoles are hard (**) to beat. Like anything in the tech industry performance is proportional to price. i.e. To increase performance you need to spend exponentially more.
(**) Hard, but not impossible.
If consoles are "right" for you really depends on what your budget is, what your wants/needs are, if you care about "exclusives" (which are blatant attempts to sell a platform), and how much you are willing to buy into a locked-down ecosystem. As a gamer if you just want to play games and can't afford a good desktop then consoles are a relatively inexpensive way to get into most (***) games. If you something more long term then a good "future-proof" CPU is AMD's Ryzen 3600X. Another great choice is Ryzen 3900X.
(***) Good luck playing RTSs, such as Starcraft 2, on consoles.
Typically upgrading a desktop more then once in 5 years is a waste of money as you are moving laterally not forward. There are exceptions of course, such as GPU upgrades.
Disclaimer: I've shipped games on PS1, PS2, PC, (among others) so I have some experience.
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Very informative!
These specs also set a good floor for any new gaming PC one might build. If you're not going to match the specs of the next generation of console, you're going to be paying more for less, and so that wouldn't make much sense for a PC used only for gaming.
For a mixed-use PC, if you want to play new games it's good to try to match last-gen console specs, as game engines tend to downgrade gracefully to that.
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I've got a monster system which can still eat a PS5 alive, but I'm still planning on buying a PS5. Sometimes I just want to play the version they actually made sure to polish, instead of the Steam release.
The other interesting bit is the increased memory and drive bandwidth. That's the big thing, I think. Filling all 16 GB of RAM in < 2 seconds is pretty sweet.
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Yup, there are definitely differences in polish! For example, Diablo 3 on the PS4 has a 1D scrolling list on inventory, but on PC it is the standard 2D grid from ARPGs.
The console controls on Diablo 3 are also streamlined for a gamepad. If you have Carpal Tunnel then using a gamepad can alleviate some of that since you don't have to excessive and obnoxiously click with the index finger like you do on PC -- you can use your left thumb for movement. Technically, on PC there IS a Push-To-Walk button but you
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These new consoles are basically Ryzen Zen 2 CPUs. These are really great CPUs, and they are going to be available for PCs as well. They're out for laptops now, and the desktop versions (which will scale far beyond the one in the PS5) are coming out around September.
The console GPU is basically a Radeon RX 5700. You can get a lot faster GPUs for PCs, and even faster ones are coming soon. It's a decent budget GPU though.
What they are showing is amazing, but it's not purely powered by hardware -- a lot of
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The GPU in PS5 and Xbox Series X will be RDNA2 based, which is architecturally newer than the RX 5700's RDNA/Navi platform and has an excessive amount of rumours promising massive performance and efficiency leaps to be proper
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There is no PC developer that can make games completely counting on the gaming device to have IO speeds faster than PCI-E 4.0 by default. This allows for streaming assets into memory at an entirely different speed.
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You're missing the point.
* What UE5 can do is revolutionary, albeit not limited to consoles
* PS5 can run UE5 and content well
* PS5 titles will therefore likely be an incredible evolution beyond what has been possible on any other console
Sure, PCs are going to be able to do it too. But people buy consoles for the specific titles, and knowing that they've bought a solution in a box for a reasonable price that all that content will be targetted for and run well on, without having to care about all the technica
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Better than what current-gen PC's are capable of? No. I highly doubt that PS5 (that this video was done on supposedly) or next-gen console are going to have any significant amount of power above what current-gen PCs have. I'd say this is more of a catch up to update the tools and paradign so that everyone is focused on what current-gen hardware is actually capable of. (versus the current PC market which for the last many years seems to be stuck in a loop of ever increasingly high resolutions and/or frame ra
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I highly doubt that PS5 (that this video was done on supposedly) or next-gen console are going to have any significant amount of power above what current-gen PCs have.
The place where the PS5 is really going to outshine the vast bulk of PC's is going to be in raw I/O performance. It has a full 5.5GB/s of I/O bandwidth built-in, and can load approximately 16GB of data in 2s flat. SATA 3 is only 600MB/s by comparison. Games are going to be able to stream in new digital assets (models, textures, audio, etc.) completely seamlessly, meaning that levels can be a lot more expansive, and have a lot more variety to their terrain.
Time will tell how well developers can take advan
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Re: Is it much better than PC graphics? (Score:2)
Focusing on the right thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
The part I care about in graphics development isn't the absolute top of fidelity, but the worst. If UE5 can make it trivial to create amazing graphics, that is an impressive feat. If EA can contract 9 different studios to craft a beautiful in-game world, that seems irrelevant. Money can always create great graphics but making such feats possible for indie developers or small studios would be an accomplishment. Much like we all learned in our CS bachelor, it's the worst case scenario that is of interest.
It seems like this helps Indies (Score:1)
From watching the demo video it did seem like this tech would help Indies, because there would be much less effort required to optimize graphics assets you load into the system, and also not having to worry about custom lighting tweaks since things like bounce-light are taken care of automatically.
It seems like then you could have a smaller team just working on art assets and game mechanics, without as many people devoted to making all of that work within the game engine...
So it'll be interesting to find ou
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Some of the stuff pouring out of the AI labs for creating textures, levels, animation and astonishingly speech will completely revolutionise games.
Game have gotten shorter and more linear with motion capture, voice acting etc as all that costs so much. If the AI can generate people, animations, voices on the fly... well... all bet are off on how rich games can be. They will also be in reach of small teams - and even one-man bands.
Re:Focusing on the right thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
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A lot of the changes here were about completely redesigning the workflow on how things are created. A ton of work the team would manually do before is getting handled automatically by the engine now.
No more baking lightmaps, it can all be dynamic.
No need to create multiple Level of Detail models for assets, the engine can do it dynamically.
It sounds like a lot of optimizations that devs would have to spend a lot of time doing manually can now be done better at runtime by the engine.
Diminishing returns (Score:1)
is what I see.
Since somewhere between Crysis and real-time global illumination.
With universal shaders, the GPU is nothing more than a vector processor unit anyway.
Re: Diminishing returns (Score:2)
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Beautiful Environment... (Score:5, Insightful)
but the character still looks like a cartoon. Huge amounts of the human brain is dedicated to processing faces, wish the same effort was directed to rendering in-game characters rather than the world they inhabit.
Re: Beautiful Environment... (Score:1)
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Funnily enough, game physics engines do not seem to be able to simulate realistic natural nor fake boobs. Supposedly too many interactions of soft tissues that take place in boobs that make it too work heavy for real time physics engine.
That's how we got the "game boobs" that either bounce like balls or barely move.
Even modern japanese 3d porn games that actually try to simulate realistic boobs seem to have this problem. It's rather hilarious. On the bright side, at least there isn't as much of market for r
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On the engine side the same effort is put into human characters, you just underestimate just how much goes into creating photorealistic faces we process as looking real. Static objects and environments which do little more than sway are orders of magnitude easier to get "right". Modern game engines already deal with an incredible amount of complex properties such as the scattering of light through thin fleshy parts, pupil dilation, skin over bones, the problem is a studio actually needs to make use of this
Re:Beautiful Environment... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't play a ton of modern games, the biggest recent one being Witcher 3, and in that game many of the principal characters look nearly photo-realistic. These days the biggest immersion breakers in well-built games are not the faces themselves, but the animations for those faces. The human face is chock full of muscles to display different states of emotion, and for the most part game tech has not kept up in simulating this well. In many games just the lips and eyelids of the characters have animation.
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but the character still looks like a cartoon. Huge amounts of the human brain is dedicated to processing faces, wish the same effort was directed to rendering in-game characters rather than the world they inhabit.
We'll get there pretty soon [arxiv.org], thanks to everyone's favorite buzzword. We've done primitive 3DMM fitting for a long time but there's very promising experiments on differentiable rendering engines that's not just generating hyperrealistic [thisperson...texist.com] 2D images but actually rendering them from a 3D model. Now unconstrained rendering has a ton of parameters (mesh, texture, diffuse albedo, specular albedo, projection, lighting, physics) that makes this very hard but we're getting there. Then of course you need animation so t
Re:Beautiful Environment... (Score:5, Insightful)
but the character still looks like a cartoon
That was an artistic/stylistic choice on their part, not necessarily a limitation of the engine.
I remember shortly after the UE3 engine came out I was having a discussion with a fellow gamer. He expressed displeasure that all of the characters in UE3-powered games seemed to have exaggerated features like huge muscles and oversized feet/hands (think Gears of War or Starcraft marine aesthetic), suggesting that these misshapen bodies were in some way imposed by the engine. I suggested that was simply the "in" aesthetic right then and pointed out a handful of UE3 games that didn't do as he said, but he still tried to insist it was in some way imposed by the engine.
Similarly, a few years back I was playing a game that had done some rather impressive things graphically, especially given the size of their team. My wife glanced at the game as she was walking by one day and said something to the effect of, "This game really doesn't have very good graphics, hmm?", which caught me by surprise. I pointed out the live fluid simulations, reflections, refractions, occlusions, bump maps, etc., to which she replied, "Okay, but that tree still looks funny". As with the rest of the game, the tree had a simple, almost cartoony art style that was exaggerated in form, oversaturated in color, and ever-so-slightly dreamlike in appearance. The designers had deliberately elected to use that style for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that it would age better than a photorealistic aesthetic. The graphics really were quite impressive, but the aesthetic choices were blinding my wife to them.
Likewise, the model in this demo looks weird, not because they failed at a technological level, but rather because they wanted to put the focus on other aspects of the demo. Faces are notoriously hard to get right because our brains have a lifetime of experience at knowing what they're supposed to look like. If a designer goes for a photorealistic face, your brain will compare the face against what's expected and will recoil because it's nearly impossible to get photorealistic faces with modern technology (see: Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia in Rogue One). But if they instead deliberately make the face obviously non-photorealistic, they can (generally, but not always) bypass the part of your brain that wants to reject the face as wrong. It's the same reason we can watch cartoons without batting an eye at the weird proportions and flappy lips, but we get hung up by games with bad lip syncing and skin that looks more like plastic than flesh.
Because they clearly and deliberately exaggerated the model's facial features, we can tell that they were hoping to bypass the topic of whether she, herself, looks realistic so that they could instead put more focus on some other parts of the technology. Which makes sense, since the focus was on high-poly models, 8K resolution textures, global illumination, and contextually-aware animations, rather than on subsurface scattering (i.e. making flesh look translucent) or other technologies that would've been applicable to a discussion about making photorealistic people.
Re: Beautiful Environment... (Score:2)
The tech demos are probably cross-platform, so there's a good chance that the character is exaggerated so that it's easier to visually identify on phone-sized screensâ" Much like the way websites adapted gigantic font sizes so their designs work on screens large and small. A lot of video game design is about artistically solving pr
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How is this even remotely look like a bloody cartoon?
I mean, it really does look cartoonish... How does it not look that way to you? Have you watched so much anime that you think it's reality?
Where is the graphics engine you've developed again?
Wait- his opinion is invalid because he hasn't written a graphics engine? What kind of dumb fucking argument is that?
Given PS5 has a built in real time ray tracer (Score:2)
Wouldn't they be better off using that instead of chucking in yet more polygons like its still 1995? Yes, portability, but if you want to show the real top end stuff you should use the hardware to its full capabilities.
Re:Given PS5 has a built in real time ray tracer (Score:5, Insightful)
Current generation of ray-tracing is really only useful for illumination/shadows/reflections (which I suspect it is used for in the video), it's nowhere near powerful enough to render the entire geometry of the scene.
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This. The GP is also forgetting that NVIDIA's claim of "it just works" only just works if you limit yourself exclusively to one piece of hardware. Raytracing is fine and all, but at present 100% of gaming systems on the market are not PS5s, so developers will have to implement classic mechanics anyway. .
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Plus the PS5 isn't using an NVIDIA GOU, it's an AMD GPU base off the Navi architecture. AMD hasn't made real-time ratracing available on any of their cards as of now, but the hardware is there to do it. I expect that will come this fall also.
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Indeed but that's not the point I was trying to make. Even if AMD did have native raytracing hardware available you would still have to push boundaries of graphics using a classic technique as raytracing is not ubiquitous. Either that or you release a game for only a small subset of the gaming market which has the right hardware, and that is not a winning strategy in this industry.
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Global illumination is literally rendering illumination for the entire geometry of the scene.
Though you're not wrong that it isn't powerful enough. Complex geometry brings the fastest ray tracing GPUs to their knees.
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Current generation of ray-tracing is really only useful for illumination/shadows/reflections (which I suspect it is used for in the video), it's nowhere near powerful enough to render the entire geometry of the scene.
Depends on the scene.
https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
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Given that close to 100% of the gaming world is not using an at present non-existent console it may be worth while hedging his bets and providing improvements that hardware which currently exists can use rather than attempting to become instantly irrelevant.
So realistic, you could model real life (Score:2)
Get off my lawn! (Score:3)
Back in my day, we had Combat on the Atari 2600 and we liked it.
2kB should be enough for anyone.
Play here (multiplayer!):
https://www.retrogames.cz/play_213-Atari2600.php?language=EN/ [retrogames.cz]
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You damned, young whippersnappers. We were satisfied with "Pong."
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Pong?
Spoiled brats. We had sticks, rubber balls, and jacks.
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Back in my day, if you wanted Pong you went to the store, bought the magazine, and typed in the program. THEN you had Pong.
Re: Get off my lawn! (Score:2)
Such mixed feelings about this (Score:2)
If only one of the best game engines on the market wasn't run and owned by the person single-handedly hell bent on destroying PC gaming for the sake of profits. I mean the only thing that could make him more hostile right now is to force UE5 games to be exclusive to the Epic Launcher.
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Epic Bad narrative is interesting and all, but problem of Steam charging 30% for putting games on their quasi-monopolistic store is arguably a far worse of a problem.
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Steam's monopolistic practices do suck, for sure.
But Epic is undercutting a market with exclusives, driving consumers to a platform that is frankly a steaming shit-filled dumpster fire.
It's so fucking bad that people simply wait a year for the games to come out on Steam anyway.
I'm not sure Steam is far worse of a problem. I am one of the ones who waited for the exclusives to expire. I have 2 games on Epic store. I won't add another until it doesn't fucking suck.
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>But Epic is undercutting a market with exclusives, driving consumers to a platform that is frankly a steaming shit-filled dumpster fire.
I'm 100% on board. But then, I remember how steam started, and how that fucked up CS update 1.6 shoving early steam down my throat made me leave my favourite game at the time, and I'm a whole lot less pissed off.
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I was absolutely willing to give it a shot.
It's at that point I realized they don't really give that much of a fuck about it. They're just trying to disrupt the market with it.
Which is good for them... Not so good for the schmucks who do the disrupting for them.
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>I'd like to think it's growing pains, but the platform has been a steaming pile of shit from day 1, and hasn't improved. Not an iota.
It took Steam several years just to stop randomly crashing and in process killing whatever game you happened to be running at the time. Epic is not doing that on day one. Like I said, I'm all on board, until I remember that the evils of Epic's market disruption are far less egregious than evils of Steam at the same stage of its development. They're not crashing my games, a
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Are you seriously here to argue that steam's quasi-monopolistic stranglehold on PC gaming market is a good thing for consumers and developers?
If that's what you got out that, I can't help you much.
The argument I made, is that Epic isn't serious about this. They're just throwing a grenade into the market. That people who bought into Epic will end up with a scattering of games that they can't port anywhere else on a platform that gets zero attention.
And *that* is not good for the poor assholes who bought into their gambit.
I'm not defending Steam, nor did I *ever*.
I'm criticizing the apparent intentions of Epic.
Any disruption to this monopolistic regime is inherently a good thing.
This is asinine thinking right h
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So you just have a personal grudge against Sweeney. Cool. I'm not a fan of that guy either. Between his highly questionable China dealings, and his decision to kill Paragon because "he needed all hands on deck for Fortnite", I'm pretty close to being a hater myself. That is, if I gave a fuck about personalities in business. I don't even hate Kotick, I just find his actions to extremely anti-gamer, and therefore disprove of his actions rather than personality where his actions are bad.
This frees me to praise
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This frees me to praise such people when they do good things as well. It's quite liberating.
And that was just a weak ass attempt at dismissing my argument by framing it as a personal grudge, when I made it clear it was his actions I disagreed with.
This doesn't change the fact that he's the only one who poses any serious challenge to the Steam problem of PC gaming.
Absolutely. And he did it by limited the choice of consumers.
It's OK, the ends justify the means, ya?
Got a local business monopolizing something? Nuke the fucking town.
I think you've got a real perspective problem.
And now, I'm still waiting for what it is that you find so objectionable about this:
Simple:
He openly admits that he's engaging in this shitty consumer-damaging business tactic just to force some other business to play by h
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Let's get into the meat of the argument then, shall we?
>Games: Choice limited.
You can still buy those games. Epic isn't blocking you from getting them. It's merely blocking you from purchasing them on a quasi-monopolistic platform that is Steam. In this regard, I'm in complete agreement with Epic. The only way to tear down a digital "platform" monopolist is to lock them out of some of the content if they don't agree to provide better terms for everyone.
If you have any other way to prevent the ongoing abu
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>Games: Choice limited.
That was supposed to be Gamers:, as in we lose choice in what ecosystem we want to play in. That's literally the point of exclusivity deals- to take away choice. Create a market advantage by forcing consumers to use your gateway if they want that product.
The only "Steam Exclusives" I'm familiar with of note are Valve's own software, which they *definitely* used to drive people to their launcher/ecosystem once upon a time.
And if Epic had stuck with their store being just for their games, I don't think anyo
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>That was supposed to be Gamers:, as in we lose choice in what ecosystem we want to play in.
And in current situation, for overwhelming majority of games, you do not have that choice. You play it on Steam, or you do not play it. Something you keep dancing around without facing. And it's just as forced by Steam through its monopolistic position abuse as it is forced by Epic through it's exclusivity deals. Different methods, same outcome.
>There's zero trust in them. Even if Valve is a big abusive bastard
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And in current situation, for overwhelming majority of games, you do not have that choice. You play it on Steam, or you do not play it. Something you keep dancing around without facing. And it's just as forced by Steam through its monopolistic position abuse as it is forced by Epic through it's exclusivity deals. Different methods, same outcome.
And yet, those developers are *free* to put it elsewhere if they want.
If they can swallow a lack of DRM, GoG is open.
If they want (better than Epic) margins? Discord.
The primary driver for most of those games you can't get elsewhere, is the fact that Steam now has an open policy. Their list is non-curated.
So, have you ever seen how Linus Torvalds behaves? Does that make Linux a shit OS that no one should ever touch?
Of course it doesn't.
But that's yet another disingenuous comparison, now isn't it?
Linux will exist if Torvalds goes away. It's open source- and we're all free to fork it.
Trust in Torvalds is not why
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You can still buy those games. Epic isn't blocking you from getting them. It's merely blocking you from purchasing them on a quasi-monopolistic platform that is Steam. In this regard, I'm in complete agreement with Epic. The only way to tear down a digital "platform" monopolist is to lock them out of some of the content if they don't agree to provide better terms for everyone.
The whole hate for Epic comes because they do, in fact, block you from getting them if you don't buy through the Epic Game Store. It's not like you can get them everywhere except Steam. The exclusivity is the problem. Valve has never paid for exclusivity and does not mandate it. Steam's only actual mandate to game developers is "If you are selling DLC or addons to a game that you sell on Steam, you must also sell it on Steam" (the root of the disagreement with EA) and this seems reasonable to me. They are i
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And in current situation, for overwhelming majority of games, you do not have that choice. You play it on Steam, or you do not play it. Something you keep dancing around without facing. And it's just as forced by Steam through its monopolistic position abuse as it is forced by Epic through it's exclusivity deals. Different methods, same outcome.
Give one example of Value abusing their position.
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Every single game that isn't published outside Steam on PC because Valve's quasi-mopolistic position. Exact same argument that is used against Epic. Same outcome, different methods.
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>And yet, those developers are *free* to put it elsewhere if they want.
Except that they're obviously not, because extra development time, support time and so on aren't free in a real world.
>The primary driver for most of those games you can't get elsewhere, is the fact that Steam now has an open policy. Their list is non-curated.
Except that it obviously still is, just not for quality. Steam still curates for things like adult content. See their current ongoing anime games brouhaha.
>Linux will exist
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So you're saying that any developer who chooses not to publish outside Steam is the same as Epic paying them not to publish outside the Epic game store?
That's a ridiculously reductive position to take. No developer is locked into Steam. I thought there were going to be instances of developers being pressured or something. You're accusing them of abuse because they were the first to provide the platform and tooling.
Sure, Steam has first mover advantage, but if a developer wants to publish their game outside
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>So you're saying that any developer who chooses not to publish outside Steam is the same as Epic paying them not to publish outside the Epic game store?
No, I'm saying Valve's variant is worse because of Valve's position and impact of said decision. Being able to project monopolistic power is a multiplier on any anti-competitive action, that makes tiniest such actions far more potent that significant anti-competitive actions by a much smaller actor.
Hence Epic can mostly secure timed exclusives that later
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Except that they're obviously not, because extra development time, support time and so on aren't free in a real world.
And yet most releases aren't exclusive, or bound by exclusivity agreements, so clearly a hypothetical that isn't backed up by empirical evidence.
Except that it obviously still is, just not for quality. Steam still curates for things like adult content. See their current ongoing anime games brouhaha.
No, they don't, and even if they did- what a stupid fucking point to make.
You fucking love making false equivalencies.
And if Sweeney goes away, Epic Games will continue to exist.
And will likely quit trying to purchase monopolies in the market.
(And since you want to split hairs, "forking it" won't save you from not having anyone managing the mess that is kernel development. There's a reason why he's still in his position in spite of politically correct crowd having tried to deplatform him for years, and even having a short term success until people who actually matter realised that there wasn't really anyone who could replace him and told him to get back to work.)
Here we go- this makes more sense.
You're just spewing talking points.
The value of Linux is not Torvalds. That doesn't mean that Torvalds doesn't have value.
Linux can't be canceled,
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I mean the only thing that could make him more hostile right now is to force UE5 games to be exclusive to the Epic Launcher.
Please don't give Swiney any fucking ideas.
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Playstation is cool but... (Score:2)
Its for Developers, not the players. (Score:2)
If the Unreal Engine version 5 does what it promises, the game market changes from top to bottom.
The challenge in modern game development is to optimize the objects, characters, and graphics prepared in other programs, more importantly to the game engine in accordance with the atmosphere promised by the game.
So now I can create a GTA 5 clone with the free content I gather here from the internet, from here, but none of the existing game engines can run this game at the proper frame rate.
Now Epic says, I made
Texture mapping? (Score:2)
That being the case, how much longer do we still need texture mapping? It's really is hacky in the first place. And for the lighting effects they show, even a big flat surface would need lighting computed at many points if the light were nearby - you can't just interpolate from the corners.
Nice demo but... (Score:2)
Developers should scale images and reduce polys in their pipeline to what the user will see. Their pipeline should still be simpler because faster I/O and SSDs do away with duplication of d
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... developers MUST optimize their assets. It's not just performance that matters but little things like download size and storage footprint. Yeah it's really nice you can supposedly optimize a billion polygons down to 30 million in realtime but what good is that if the game takes up 30x more time to download and store? Developers should scale images and reduce polys in their pipeline to what the user will see.
Well in the real world you can get very, very close to most objects simply by walking up to them and/or picking them up. You can usually get away with it on textures by reusing them or generating fake detail on the fly, but not structural details. It doesn't help that in free-form movement you don't control the viewing angle either, there's a lot of trickery that works head on but falls apart as you realize it's just a 3D painting on a 2D surface. It's not really done until you can't tell it apart from Nat
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Unreal Engine related to Unreal gfx demo in 1990s? (Score:2)
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The Xbox always had a faster Jaguar proc than the Playstations, yet every title that ran on both platforms ran at higher resolution and features on the Playstation- because the Playstation started with a better GPU.
And frankly, both GPUs are poop compared to what's used in PCs.
The new consoles both reverse which has the better GPU performance, and are comparable to high end PC GPUs.
So it's a pretty cool advancement for consoles.