Unreal Engine 5 First Generation Games: Brilliant Visuals & Growing Pains

[Music] Unreal Engine 5 games are finally coming out now with the first thirdparty games on that engine releasing on PC and consoles since summer of 2023 for the audience on PC these launches are both exciting and well terrifying on the one hand they're very exciting of course because we get to see all that awesome eye candy that epic promised with their first demo of the engine in 2020 3 years ago real-time Global illumination with Lumen seamless level of detail with Nite and Ray traced quality Shadows without Hardware Ray tracing thanks to Virtual Shadow maps on the other hand as I mentioned it's kind of terrifying as we have nearly a decade of Unreal Engine 4 games behind us which honestly has left a kind of bad taste to my mouth due to the massive performance issues encountered in Unreal Engine 4 on PC with the those two conflicting poles of emotion in my mind I thought it would be great to make a Roundup video of sorts where I talk about the good and the great things I'm seeing so far from various Unreal Engine 5 releases that I have played on PC as well as a number of the not so good things that I'm seen in these releases a video that is kind of early barometer of sorts about how developers are coming to grips with their release of that engine on PC and perhaps what it might mean for the future of u5 on the platform I'm not going to be covering any one game though here very specifically like I said rather I'll be giving a poper of Impressions after play testing a variety of games including the demos of jant Robocop Rogue City and the Talis principal 2 and the games Remnant to Immortals of avum Lords of the Fallen disorder Fort soless and layers of fear I have a bit to cover here so let's get right into it firstly with those much LED Unreal Engine 5 graphical features so how are they holding up on P PC well honestly I think the first couple releases we have here are leveraging most of the features in a really great Manner and generally all games I played here were rather good-looking in a variety of ways in games like the tals principle 2 for example we can see how Crow team is heavily leveraging all three key Technologies of lumen nanite and virtual Shadow maps to great effect take Lumen for example one thing you can do in a number of u5 titles is actually turn off Lumen with the global illumination setting in the graphical options menu this is a global quality parameter in ue5 that you can find in a number of ue5 releases that allow you to turn it down to medium or lower which will turn off Lumen GI when we do that we can see there's a massive massive difference in lighting quality when Lumen is disabled in a game like the Tallow principle too so you can really see how lum's Local Light bouncing and shadowing from the skylighting is making this image looks so different from the fallback sdfa solution that is used without it lum is just looking great in a lot of the games I played for example in the game dant where it's one of the best Showcases of lumen I would say for a couple of reasons for one because the game almost has no texture detail so surface lighting is the thing driving most of the game's detail secondly I think it's because the Artisan developers behind jant really leverage the technology in a great way they use it to enhance visual contrast in every part of the demo I played Corners away from the sky get suitably darker and darker the deeper you peer into them and the Sun and the Skylight bouncing around the scene objects looks suitably convincing I think jant has a really great artist driven usage of the global illumination and it's working around lum's limitations really well most of the time where they seem to be placing lights and blockers at times to work around some of lum's issues so lum's first impressions I would say are definitely great across the variety of titles I played for the most part I say for the most part because sometimes it's not so great a good example can be found in the fact that many in fact nearly all of of the titles I tested ship with only software Lumen enabled software Lumen is the version of lumen that does not leverage the hardware in most recent modern gpus that accelerates raate tracing as a result software Lumen tries to be cheap to render by reducing quality and you can see that in a lot of games like Lords of the Fallen here which only ships with software Lumen the reflections on water surfaces in software Lumin for example leave a lot to be desired where you can see a lot of screen space artifacts where SSR is used greatly to in detail and when you do see the actual Reflections from software Lumen well then they're not too great looking they're pretty Blobby and low quality and there's no Dynamic objects in them like characters or vegetation usually another issue with software Lumen that's been shipped in the game so far is that there's a lot of issues with light leaking or instability like here in Lords of the Fallen this orange light from the sun most likely is leaking through the wall here so our character walking in front of it is causing it to phase in and out of existence or here in tallow's principle another thing you you see is that software Lumen is not good enough for emissive surface lighting to be handled in great detail so all the lighting from the power lines that is done with em missives is done in screen space so it'll disappear and reappear based on where the camera is looking and what objects are may be getting in front of that lighting so software Len's quality trade-offs I think are very visible in the games that have shipped so far depending upon where you're looking here I think a lot of titles would do better to also offer an option for Hardware Lumen like fortnite does and and a couple other titles such as disorder disorder has a really great menu where it allows you to turn on Hardware Lumen so you can get better reflection detail and more stable lighting for a small performance penalty those Reflections look quite a lot better in Hardware Lum than they do in software Lumin for example here or take Fort Solus for example a great looking game but it only ships with software Lumen enabled in the menu with no option to turn on Hardware Lumen given that how that game relies on a lot of emissive surfaces a number of scenes in the game have a lot of undersampled lighting issues where there's obvious boiling in the lighting on walls or bounce lighting is unstable with Hardware Lumen as we can see here the under sampling is much improved so areas get brighter as they should be and EM missives have less issues so this is why I would like to see Hardware Lumen as an option in most game menus but beyond Hardware Lumen as an option which most titles I've looked at for this video do not have it would also be great if other developers of ue5 games followed in the footsteps of the game disorder that I just talked about next to offering the ability to switch on hardware and software Lumen depending upon what you want there's also a lot of other quality knobs here for the lighting such as the ability to turn on Hardware rate traced hit lighting with the let my computer burn option this makes it so rate tracing is used to shade objects and Reflections and not the lowquality ue5 surface cache this will get rid of aliasing and lower resolution textures and other issues you might see in Reflections disorder also has the ability for you to turn on RTX di to make it so all emissive Lighting in the world and all direct lighting is done with accurate Ray tracing which adds another layer of realism and stability into the graphics you can also turn on full-on path tracing there making it so that objects in Reflections well have great Reflections and accurate bounce Lighting in their own right so this game allows you to go all the way from console level software rate tracing up to Super high-end Future Path tracing now I definitely don't expect every developer to add in things like rtxi or path tracing as they're heavy and well they tend to be Nvidia specific but I find the ability to turn on Hardware Ray traced hit lighting really great and I also find the ability to turn on Hardware Lumen essential for a ui5 title due to the great options in a game like disorder you have the ability to scale the game down to lower-end Hardware but also have it scale up to higher end hardware for the future and I think that is a great thing for any PC game another interesting thing to note about lumen in the first titles so far is how it is deployed or it isn't a game like Remnant 2 for example doesn't use Lumen at all for its lighting and it relies on other classical methods and a lot of screen space Amun occlusion actually found it a bit surprising that Remnant 2 didn't use Lumen because the game's whole randomly smacked together levels with different lighting in them seems like a perfect use case for Len's Dynamic content support but beyond that Remnant 2 shows us that not every u5 title out there is going to always ship with all the big u5 graphical features present available in the menus or otherwise Remnant 2 doesn't have Lumen like I just described well layers of fear doesn't use nanite for example or Lords of the fallen 2 for example doesn't use Virtual Shadow Maps the reasons for these admissions of core ui5 Tech are most likely various and I would imagine testing time and performance concerns on consoles are some of the key reasons there but one thing I would like to see is the ability to toggle on and off core uifi features at times in the menu if possible for example in Talis principle 2 you you can actually turn off Lumen with the global illumination parameter option much like you can do in fortnite I find that very cool but it would also be great if you could toggle on and off virtual Shadow Maps or even possibly nanite take for example Lords of the Fallen virtual Shadow Maps would add a lot to those games visuals which I've done for these comparisons you see on screed by using France bma's Unreal Engine unlocker which is a godsend for anyone who's serious about tweaking Unreal Engine games on PC imagine if they made it possible to toggle this in the game menu instead of you having to use modding wouldn't that be great it would be and gunfire games the developer of Remnant 2 actually did just that in Remnant two the graphical menu allows you to turn on and off detailed Shadows which actually toggles virtual Shadow maps on and off giving the ability for the player to run super highquality shadows in the game or older cascaded shadow Maps once again more options are always great for the user also Remnant 2 has the interesting option to turn on and off detail geometry which actually completely turns off nanite according to the console variables I investigated when it is disabled the game instead presents the lower quality backup mesh of nanite geometry and can increase performance this is a very curious thing and I don't expect a lot of titles to do this but it is something that technically the engine supports for example if I turn off nanite using Unreal Engine unlocker and other titles such as Mortals of avium we can see that it also reverts to the lower quality geometry there which could potenti improve performance on some gpus while I don't expect it I actually find this a great option to find in Remnant 2 and I would love if other developers maybe also enabled it for their games for an ultra low-end option getting back to Lumen again of course one thing that caught me a bit off guard is that sometimes Lumen will not be incredibly obvious in the title you're playing in a game like layers of fear I didn't find it too obvious for example that Lumen was in play or for example in Lords of the Fallen there were a number of scenes in that that game where I didn't think that there was really any Global illumination at all in the PC version for example look at this area here and look at how all the objects in the scene almost look like they lack any ambient shadowing not even like the hint of ssao this is very different for example to the look that I'm used to seeing with Ray Trace GI for example like that we just saw in jant where there's just that really awesome per pixel shaded look to all the objects in the game so for whatever reason and whatever the developers did here even though the game is using Lumen they have a number of scenes where they have made it so it doesn't look like it's using Lumen basically with this I mean to say just because a game is using ue5 doesn't mean it will always look like a ue5 game all the time so that's something to keep in mind for the future and I really do hope though that developers that are leveraging this new ui5 tech do use it in a way where it serves the gaml and Fidelity at the same time which it doesn't always do in Lords of the fallen in certain areas of that game on PC one last Lumen thing I want to mention is that if you are having trouble with performance in an Unreal Engine 5 game one thing you should look to be doing is turning down the quality of the global illumination lighting setting and reflection setting one down from the highest this will turn down the quality in a way that can be obvious at times depending upon what you're looking at but it is also an incredible way to save performance in a quick optimized settings tip it's the way they optimize for Lumin on Console by turning down its quality and it is something that mid-range gpus should also look at doing on PC coming to Performance and user experience I want to praise the first batch of Unreal Engine titles for having a much better image quality options than most ui4 titles almost every ui5 title I tested for this video offered dlss FSR 2 xss and unreal engines TSR not all of them did mind you but a great majority offered a variety of reconstruction techniques and this makes sense as these things are just simple plugins in Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 this is really great to see and I like how it was laid out in a lot of the menus here too okay but what about unreal engine's best friend Shader compilation stutter here I can report both great and not so great things for one all of the titles I tested here for this preview handled Shader compilation stutter better than nearly every Unreal Engine 4 title that I've tested for digital Foundry the reason for this is because most recent versions of Unreal Engine as in 5.1 and above have a new Justin Time Shader pre-compilation step that'll sort Shader permutations ahead of time and prepare them before they're needed on screen and it can also electively delay them to prevent stutter if the developer sets it up to do that in theory this should catch Shader compilation stutter and it does these games I tested like I said had less Shader compilation stutter than many ue4 games I have tested but still that system is imperfect and a number of obvious Shader compilation stutters were found actually in nearly every single title I tried out there with some having a good deal more than others T's principle 2 for example had to select few when playing the game like for example when I first placed this object in the game world and we could see an outline effect show around the object yep and that caused the Shader comp stutter Remnant 2 also had a good few where like the first time for example where I damaged this enemy here yep there was a Shader compilation stutter or the first time I saw this enemy type an effect type while there were some really big Shader comp stutters there when I was playing or Fort soless which tended to have more Shader compilation stutters than I actually expected sometimes really getting in the way of the game there a few of the games I tested did not have identifiable Shader compilation stutter those would be the RoboCop demo Lords of the fallen and disorder the reason for this I think is because these games use the new Shader compilation system and they also had an obvious dedicated pre-compilation step before the game started up and I think this is rather key the automated Shader compilation system is imperfect and will miss obvious shaders that need to be compiled but when combined with the old manual system that you could have also found in ui4 games well then guess what more shaders were prepared and the game was better for it so as I see it ue5 developers at this moment still need to offer a Shader pre-compilation step on top of the new Justin Time system to get rid of Shader compilations tutter otherwise you have cases like in Remnant 2 or Talis principal 2 or in Fort Sol where you can see obvious Shader compilation stutter there which is not really a great thing to see in 2023 Beyond Shader compilation stutter this first batch of ui5 titles also still has traversal stutter in nearly every single one so while ui5 does do Shader compilation stutter better than ui4 did per default it still will have issues with frame time spikes that is induced by loading or deloading assets when game worlds are traversed I found this one to be a bit disheartening as even simple titles like jant manag to show the odd traversals that are here or there on a big CPU like 12 900k this is a separate issue of course from Shader compilation stutter and I'm not sure how much control developers of these games actually have over this issue the fact that I found it so readily in all the games I played points to it being a somewhat engine side issue I would say traversal stutters definitely have a negative effect on the gaming experience when they pop up for example in Lords of the Fallen where running through this area always in reduces stutters in and around the staircase and as you go through the Hub area in the game it doesn't look and feel good when you run through this area of the game for sure at best like we can see here with the ryzen 53600 versus the 12900 K bigger CPUs with more single core performance will reduce the amount of stuttering that occurs and the size of the stutters but you will still see them even on really big CPUs which means everyone out there is going to be affected by traversal stutters much in the same way everyone is affected by Shader compilation stutters they can have a very negative effect on the game experience such as in Lords of the fallen and they can ruin otherwise gorgeous moments or I would say the atmospheric aspect of video gaming is completely undermined by the stuttering that is happening on screen one thing that is important to note about traversal stutter that I'm seeing in the first batch of ui5 games is the fact that these ue5 games are often single thread limited and make poor usage of modern multi-threaded processors now I've shown this in the past when i t talked about UEI 5.2 and the electric dreams demo where it barely scaled on more CPU threads the same thing can be found in this first batch of uie 5 games for example if I run around Lords of the fallen 2 with eight P cores enabled on a I9 12900 K well it's pretty easy to look at the utilization there and we can see how two threads are just pegged and being blasted at full While others are much less encumbered here we're probably looking at uie 5's render thread and perhaps it's rhi thread or maybe it's the game thread either way we're seeing that some threads are much more encumbered than others and if we do performance testing we can see that more threads does not equal more performance in fact it will decrease the performance look at Lords of the fallen again running around through the game World there showcases that the best performance configuration on the core I 9 1200k is actually to decrease the amount of cores and threads the game has access to the fastest running configuration is six cores and adding more cores and threads after the fact actually decreases performance a little bit by around 10% for example if you use the full 12900 K I don't think this is a good look and to contrast it with something better like cyberpunk 2077 we can see substantial gains in performance by increasing cores above six in that game something that I would love to see in ui5 games this has been an Unreal Engine issue for quite a long time but here I think we can have a bit of Hope actually based on epic's presentations at the unreal Fest in 2023 they're looking to increase the engine's multi-threading capabilities which till this point Point has been Legacy hold over from Unreal Engine 4 to a larger degree they're looking to break up the rhi and render thread to be more parallel and reduce unnecessary work and based upon that presentation where they showed big increases in performance when running the Matrix demo it seems like this could be one of the biggest updates for CPU performance in Unreal Engine history and it's definitely a long time coming and the changes are going to start happening with Unreal Engine 5.4 so better CPU performance is definitely coming in this future to more recent versions of the engine than the games I've been playing for this video and I hope what this means is that there's going to be less stutter when we play these games that have large big worlds that are traversed quickly such as that we see in Lords of the Fallen as less things encumbering a single thread means there's going to be less spikes to frame time one thing I want to talk about last is texture quality now the virtual texturing that is enabled by default when you use Nan Unreal Engine 5 makes so that the games shipped so far in ui5 actually tend to have really great texture quality it's hard to complain there the developers in all the games I tested other than jant of course are really using that texture quality enabled by virtual texturing to a great degree and they're doing in a way that is very vram efficient most games I played for this video maxed out at a little over 8 GB when playing at 4K dlss quality mode on an RTX 490 but it must be said perhaps this low usage of vram is also a little too aggressive in a number of the titles that I played for this video there were some obvious texture popping that would occur very close to the camera at times even on an RTX 490 which of course has gobs of vram to spare which is obviously not being put to use here to prevent texture streaming for example in Fort soless a lot of textures at times like for the UI or for the Martian landscape would take a while to phase in even while moving through the game World at a slow pace or here in Lords of the Fallen where textures phase in often on camera Cuts in a way that is very noticeable here I would like it for games to offer more vram control for how much vram is being used for caching or to just be generally more greedy with vram in an automatic way and with that out of the way I think I've reached the end of this video covering the first releases of Unreal Engine 5 in very broad brush Strokes in general all the titles that I played for this video were beautiful in their own right some like Fort Solas for example I thought were rather stunning looking with the right artwork and Direction Unreal Engine 5 titles can look absolutely stunning and that's what these first releases definitely tell me I also love seeing the different image reconstruction techniques being offered in a lot of these games not all of them had every single image reconstruction technique but a good chunk did and that was awesome to see still onreal Engine 5 has some Legacy issues here in the engine that are rearing their ugly heads still in 2023 and it did sour a couple of the titles that I tested traversal stutter and Shader compilation stutter with was still there and are still actually big issues even if it is better than before in a title like Fort Solus which I just praised it was actually distracting to the point of me not wanting to play the game after a certain amount of time because every single time I saw something new I could almost expect a Shader compilation stutter to occur there this is telling me that UI 5's new automated Shader cach system is not good enough yet to be wholly relied upon titles like Lords of the Fallen for example did it much better where they combined that with a pre-compilation step and in that game I couldn't find any Shader compilation stutter really some other issues I saw is that most games shipped with too little control in their graphical options it would be great to allow users to turn on and off Hardware Lumen or even things like virtual Shadow Maps if they want to trade off performance for Quality excluding disorder most of the games I tested just used software Lumen and shipped with that and had very basic options menus and with that being said we're now at the end of this video I did say a lot but I hope you also enjoyed my broad look at real engine 5's first releases on PC if you did enjoy this video hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that 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Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 282,626

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Id: SxpSCr8wPbc

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023