Unreal Engine 5 Hands-On: Demo Analysis + Performance Benchmarks

unreal engine 5's early access has been released and i've spent the last few days looking into the released valley of the ancients demo so in today's video i will go into the technical characteristics of this demo across a variety of gpu and cpu hardware so that we can get a sense of how ue5 is targeting its visuals and perhaps performance at least in this early state and to talk about this today i'm joined of course by my friend and colleague john linnaman how you doing there john i'm doing wonderful alex like you i've been toying around with unreal engine 5 though perhaps not to the same degree owing to other projects but it's an impressive showpiece so quickly i'll touch on what this demo is and then i'm going to ask you some questions about it so when loaded into the demo you can sort of explore this world it starts out as a drone you can fly around in the drone you can get up close to objects sort of examine your surroundings or you can essentially transport to the dark world or whatever and run around as this character here it kind of gives you an idea of both free camera control and character action it's designed to showcase what nanite and lumen can offer for a very large scale environment with a ton of granular detail and it also makes use of unreal's new and improved temporal super resolution feature which is their reconstruction technology actually you know what maybe we should start with that before we get into some of the nitty-gritty details what are your what are your thoughts on this this one's really cool because uh we've usually seen in games reconstruction up to 4k happening at around like checkerboard middle resolution like 1440p ish or higher and then it usually works really well there but this tsr since it's more advanced at least that's the development behind it it's trying to get even lower resolutions to look more like 4k so if you look at these side by sides here of tsr running internally at 1080p versus the real native 4k presentation you can see how in the still shots here they're actually incredibly similar to one another and that's kind of the goal behind tsr here because the engine currently in his current form is targeting at these epic settings for this demo specifically around 1080p and 30fps on the console hardware something like playstation 5 and xbox 36x so it's about getting these lower internal resolutions looking much higher and it does a really really great job of that in this demo in terms of first impressions the only part where it starts to break apart is what you'd see with like normal taa uh usually where like the camera moves or an object moves or there's like transparency effects and that's when you can start seeing more of the ghosting or more of a breakdown in that resolution but generally this is tsr is definitely doing a really really good job i'd like to compare it to uh dlss in the future if i have the chance and more in depth yeah thinking about that i mean i think it's pretty clear that tsr is designed for consoles from a normal viewing distance in the living room i think these artifacts become less obvious on a pc monitor it can be slightly more visible which is where perhaps dlss comes into play if you're in an nvidia card of course but i guess one of the points people might note though is that the demo they showcased uh and i believe they showcased the game on our demo on both ps5 and xbox series x in their original uh video stream uh the resolution is lower um due to the increased cost of nanite in this demo but obviously you know there is a lot more to this demo than just that perhaps we should actually break this down into chunks starting i think with nanite and everything kind of around that basically when i came to this demo i wanted to look at particular parts in isolation but not go so in-depth because i want to wait more to this actually production games coming out of this because i don't want to give off false impressions of a work in progress piece of engine as well as something that's designed around a technical demo and not around a production game which will have different constraints this is pure curiosity i think on our part and then i when i initially looked into it it does exactly like they described it does you get camera really in close to an object and you can see that the detail is maintained up to a really fine resolution in terms of geometry it goes right in there and you can see it all really really well and you know the only difference that you can possibly see in this demo when i show like a really close-up shot is you may see that different objects due to the way they made this demo you can see like different levels i would say of geometric or texture detail like it's almost like they're running at different resolutions and that's just because for this demo they threw a bunch of different large mega assets as they call them together to build the terrain itself and depending upon the size of the imported asset in terms of its texture or in terms of how many actual triangles are made up of it you can see like differing levels of detail just right next to each other and that's something that i think is only going to happen in a demo like this one i think in a production game they would maybe be more aware of i would say like what's triangle counts are being put next to which triangle counts so right now i think nanda looks really great when you zoom in but in this demo at least specifically if you zoom in on certain objects you'll be like oh that doesn't look as good as this other object it is interesting though because it feels like we've finally reached the point where the visuals are constrained more by the original asset rather than like how it's used within the game engine it's pretty interesting i think a really cool part of this demo as well too is you can have really high resolution assets in games and i think we already see that a lot now but sometimes i've showed it before in videos showcasing ray tray shadows like i showed it off really well i think in uh call of duty black ops the new one where you can see in some scenes where if you turn on ray tray shadows you can see all of a sudden this geometric detail shows through a lot better because objects and all their little fine details now have little shadows on them that's something that this demo really shows off well with the virtual shadow map system which does not use traditional ray tracing like we're used to but is a very specialized form of shadow mapping and you when you get really close to objects you can also see like really you know pixel fine shadows on them maybe with a bit of aliasing at times depending on the camera angle and all these other probably factors as well but it makes the geometry show up much better than if it were not there at all and that's another really cool part of the demo kind of reminds me of uh when we first saw screen space shadows in fact it's a similar type of idea but without the screen space artifacts of course so it does look very consistent and sort of builds this beautiful environment and ties everything together in a way my favorite part about the demo actually you know i described this to you before we started talking about this on video right now but i like the the level of detail that you get from these uh little shadows and and also from the little geometric detail but it's actually when you move the camera back and forth through the terrain or zoom in on an object you don't see the usual like pop of a new level of detail being loaded in or for the for the shadows you don't see the kind of cascade distance where shadows pop in or you can see the lower resolution cascade uh kind of go to the higher resolution one and a line none of that happens in this demo i think that's the most impressive part and it impresses me more than nanite itself it's just like how you can go backwards and forwards and you don't see any of this usual video game popping effect uh that's the thing that impressed me the most that's that's kind of the the triple whammy issue in a lot of modern games where you have both the visible shadow cascade layers changing you have the lod popping and then on top of that especially in consoles texture filtering is often not cranked up so as you look across the distance and you're moving forward through the world you see all of these things changing before your eyes whereas here like you say it's absolutely striking to fly the camera through the world and it just has this consistency and solidity to it that i feel like we've not really seen before with this kind of high density environments like i said continuous level of detail as i'll call is the most impressive part of the demo for me as i say that though for some reason and i'm not sure what is exactly causing this i'm not sure if this is a bug or if this is something just the way nanite works but sometimes if you pay attention and look at the distance at an object and you move the camera forward you can almost see like a warbling effect that occurs and it made me think like oh there's like some sort of post-process uh going on here that is supposed to look like desert kind of heat haze or something like that so but and i notice also when i move the camera here like you're seeing in this video right here i move it side to side very slowly and then i stop the camera and it you can almost see like the ground doing a shuffle effect like there's almost like the ground is made up of layers that go into the distance and then shuffle into proper 3d perspective after a little bit i don't know how to describe it very well i hope people in the video are maybe seeing it so i do so it doesn't sound like i'm going crazy here but i saw this in the demo and it may be a bug it may be a feature i have no idea but it's definitely something that's here i noticed it as well and i would say it's much more subtle than this but i was kind of reminded of how when you examine textures with parallax occlusion maps enabled and they kind of start to break down obviously not to that degree but it's that same sort of impression where you can see something's a little bit off there but by and large though i think uh nanite is very very impressive in this and it's it's gonna be fantastic both for regular games but also i was thinking about its use case and like stuff like vr when the camera's very close you're in close proximity to things it might provide a level of detail that we've never seen before but of course the other major feature i think to discuss here is lumen right now because i know lumen is slightly work in progress in terms of its feature set and possibly as well regarding its performance in a number of ways i didn't want to go super in depth here but just going through the demo there's some really obvious parts where you can see luminant action lumens global illumination so bounce lighting and like here underneath this uh kind of craggy rock face as you see the sunlight hitting the ground below it you can see orange glow emanating from the ground and hitting this craggy rock face above and that's exactly what you really want to see other than for larger features if you do look up closely you see this rock on the ground here as i move the camera up and down you can see some aspects of that bounce lighting for smaller objects is done in screen space but for most of the camera angles here uh that the demo takes place in and there's not a lot of like i would call it occlusion there's not a lot of fine indirect shadows here essentially in a lot of these scenes which would make maybe some of these screen space aspects a little bit more obvious but in the demo itself it it definitely does a really great job but as we'll get to a bit later i think it is very expensive here we can go over to performance i think uh first starting with the cpus to test cpu performance here i set the game to 30 axis resolution with tsr on so it's like 648p it's like really low resolution internally those shots were interesting by the way uh it actually instills it does an effective job of upscaling the image from such a low resolution like this doesn't look like 648pp no no it doesn't here i found out uh at least on the nvidia driver's side that unreal engine 5 does still seem to prefer faster single cores versus uh many slightly slower cores so the core i9 10 900k ended up being around 10 faster than the ryzen 9 5950x even though of course that ryzen 5950x has way more cores way more threads and a lot more cash and all these things mid-range performance wise though the 3600 ryzen 5 3600 which i expect to be you know a little bit more powerful than a console cpu in some aspects is not uh hitting 60fps it's like right on the line and definitely if you were to move the camera around or engage in aspects of this demo it would be below 60 fps and i think this shows off just really well that this demo was designed around 30 fps cpu-wise also in terms of some of the aspects of the visuals which we'll get to later but i think it's a demo very much so designed around 30 fps and trying to get it up to 60 is perhaps harder than it would be in other you know production level games and again you've you've stressed this and said it right there this is not like a shipping game product one thing i noticed also here too is uh kind of going in with that trend that we've seen from other games recently is that the amd driver when it's cpu limited on the 10900k ran around five percent faster uh in this limited scenario here not huge numbers but definitely something that was measurable let's get into uh gpu performance then yeah so first of all it should be noted that again console versions that were shown were targeting 1080p using the tsr with epic settings up to 4k resolution essentially uh they target 30 frames per second here so it seems like a low target but the end result is good but you did note some significant differences there and found a lot of interesting data on the pc yeah for sure on the pc side here we know from what epic has kind of stated through public channels that the pc version has some slight less optimizations than the console versions of ue5 at the moment like it's not using some async stuff to make the gpu perform a little bit better as well as uh it's not using the quote unquote mesh shader path uh for those hardware rendered triangles on pc so it could technically run nanite and stuff a little bit quicker with more optimization but this is what i found so far and i put essentially the high end and the mid end right next to each other starting with the founders edition rtx 3080 on the one side here and the xfx merc speedster 319. hold on the xfx merc speedster or something like that man dude you know what i love it i miss this i hope the box has some kind of crazy like cgi rendered merc on there sadly the box is a little bit more boring but you know the card is really fast it has like a six percent oc essentially so take that into an account when i show these uh next performance with a name like that this thing better decimate everyone so how does it actually perform well in the initial part of the valley benchmark area here i noticed that the cards were performing extremely similar to one another just slightly below 60 fps at this 1080p internal epic settings you get further into the demo though and the amd gpu actually starts asserting its dominance uh it runs in this overlook section here 12 percent better which i actually think is pretty impressive um just like overlooking this area so you could say it kind of murked that uh yes other card it murked the other card here right here you know it has overclock and all that so keep that in mind the rx 6800 xt this merc edition here maintains a lead uh throughout the rest of the demo fluctuating between five or twelve percent faster depending upon what's happening a little bit less uh in the cutscenes and more uh having a larger advantage in the gameplay but if you notice when watching this both gpus are dipping handsomely as i'll describe it below 60 fps when particles detonate near the forward center of the screen which i think really just shows off how this demo is not designed as the shipping product where you would not want such large uh deviations probably in uh performance due to effects going on screen so that's one thing to keep in mind but both you know big gpus here okay are not hitting a fully stable 60 fps at this internal 1080p resolution in this demo that's kind of what i was gonna get to yes exactly so that's that's interesting but then i guess my bigger question then is how does it run on a less powerful card let's say you do not have an xfx merc speedster whatever uh but you have something a little less potent uh what did you find i read it also on my mid-range twins as i'm gonna call them rtx 2060 super stock and an rx 5700 reference card and here i found a slight reverse situation at this mid-range part where the valley scene runs ten percent better on the rtx 2060 super uh but when you get over the dark world uh you don't see an amd advantage like we saw earlier but more of the cards being equaled out with some scenes uh as part of this golem fight running in in the range of around 10 faster on the rtx 2060 super so it evens outwards towards the second half of the demo in the dark world but the rtx 2060 super ends up being faster but uh once again important to note at this 1080p internal resolution my goodness this demo is so heavy all right so what's the sort of the minimum card you need to get a locked 30 fps though here i think it's going to be around an rtx 2070 super where the majority of all this demo ran above 30 fps with only one small drop below when the golem falls and the the screen fills up with dust which is where i think you know this demo is not optimized around that at all it's just you know a demo so something like an rtx 2070 super and on the amd side an rx 5700 xt should probably do the job really really well man these epic settings here even at 1080p it is really surprising how uh demanding this is right now it's incredibly demanding with tsr enabled it is 1080p internally and it looks a lot better than 1080p of course so that's you have to always something you have to keep in mind i'm saying 1080p but that's just you know the end visual result is much better than that but still we're looking at something that is really really heavy right sure that's why there's an emphasis on scalability epic notes this in their wiki entry on lumen that they recommend not using these epic settings for games targeting higher frame rates but the high settings which i'm going to show off right here both in side-by-sides and back and forth so people in the audience get a greater understanding of what's happening i'm not going to talk about the differences in depth of field actually that happened here but that's one thing that happens between the high and the epic settings you know ignoring the depth of field in the moment and equalizing that if you look at what's happening with the lighting in the scene when you go down from epic to high as you'll see what looks like the screen space gi portion of lumen looks to be called or removed or heavily reduced to the point where you're missing some of these smaller shadows and smaller bounce lights you know like underneath the character models and things like that so there is a definite uh downgrade in the visual quality but if you imagine how most of this demo is taking place at eye level going down to high actually probably at least for these outdoor scenes is not going to be a really large difference as i say that though at this 1080p internal resolution i did run an rtx 2070 super to see what the difference would be in performance it does not bring up the scene from 30 fps to 60 fps but increases performance at least on this gpu here in this scene by around 10 so i imagine when they say in this wikipedia entry of 60 fps targeting games should be looking to use the high setting i imagine that they're actually talking about not about this demo necessarily but about other products that use lumen in the future yes so you know what this demo was not designed around trying to reach 60 but something could on this high setting be more easily designed to reach 60. that's the way i interpret it kind of feels like the big takeaway here right now the demo is very heavy but very promising seeing unreal engine 5 in action and playing around with its features it's clearly a very powerful tool nanite is is very very neat to see it's going to change the way we kind of look at world geometry going forward and lumen while very expensive is also very promising and in fact just using the editor i really like how you can essentially drop a light in the scene and just start moving it around and immediately see results in the editor without needing to rely on bakes and waiting on this stuff it's just there and that's i'll be curious to talk to more artists and hear what they think about working with tools like this i mean ray tracing in general has already brought a lot of this stuff forward and this is like another step for unreal engine i think it's just going to really help a lot with like building these worlds to make them beautiful that's exactly how i feel too yeah um getting towards the end of this demo and kind of my concluding thoughts based on what i've seen in performance and visuals i want to say that like i really think lubin looks really great in person i do just wonder what scalability settings they'll add into the future to it and how it'll evolve over time to maybe right now it's a software solution but maybe the hardware path that they end up making will end up being the way they take it in the future who really knows in terms of the demo being really heavy it was obviously really heavy on the gpu and aspects of the cpu but there were also some aspects of the demo which were not very heavy that i didn't really just describe when i'm just talking about the gpu performance the game currently when you export this demo here uh due to the way it uses virtualized textures and virtualized geometry through nanite actually it doesn't use that much vram he's using a little bit more than four gigabytes of vram wow like max even on something like an rtx 3090 while having this quality so it's really really vram efficient technology that we're looking at here which is great for you know i would say lower end devices or you know the mid-range uh gpus that you see now and also i would say the loading was really really fast the first time you play the demo and you may see videos of this out there online the first time you play it since it's not a production shipping game it's not going to precast shaders or precache anything before the game loads so it'll run slower and it'll have hitches so if you see videos out there online where people are saying i can't believe how poor ue5 is running well they're not showing actually how how ue5 runs if you run the game more than once it runs actually completely fine because it caches shaders caches data and things like that something a normal game would do on loads yep absolutely when you do that though you can see that the game loads just like they showed in the editor in their little preview video that they did uh and like around four to five seconds when you go from the lumen world like this overworld valley into the dark world and that's really really fast given the large differences in detail that we're seeing here on screen different textures different assets as well as the fact that we're looking at pcs here that are not using direct storage something like a playstation 5 would load this really really really quickly coming to the end of this year really impressed really heavy but also so much promise and john thank you so much for talking to me about this demo here absolutely and if you did like this video please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber then hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital foundry posts a video if you want to help us out support digital foundry on patreon to get years worth of our content in high quality for download if you want to talk to john or myself about this demo well write a comment below or follow both of us on twitter and as always this is alex bidding you always in and now night's really good you

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 163,764

Rating: 4.9474058 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: C99VwDGyLg0

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/QuitClearly]

VRAM usage incredibly low.

[u/PhunkeyPharaoh]

Interesting that TSR from 1080p is basically a necessity to run the demo in 4k at usable framerates, and that's with a 3080. I wonder if games that use nanite and lumen to their full potential will have the same performance requirements or if this is more to do with the demo.

[u/FarrisAT]

This should get more attention from r/Nvidia members...

The next step up in gaming. To near reality levels. A huge boost for VR as well.

[u/jlouis8]

Key take away from me is that the render is in 1080p and you are upscaling it temporally to 4k. This makes a ton of sense. It also means DLSS is going to be really important moving forward as temporal upscaling is exactly what it improves. And that while running in parallel to your compute/shader kernels.

It's also sobering on the crazy idea that the latest console generations have something "magic" up their sleeve. They don't. It's all about getting upscaling to work on a target 1080@30 delivery.

[u/Generic-VR]

What blows my mind is how much better AMD performs.

Yeah Nvidia has DLSS and Raytracing/RTX performance, but Raster for Raster I didn’t realize a 6800XT could beat a 3080 well in excess of 10%.

I’m surprised that’s not been bigger news. I watched reviews too and I never really realized till recently how much the lead was.

Then again, good luck actually buying any AMD cards, lmao. Worse than Nvidia’s situation

Edit: also will Nvidia ever fix the driver overhead issue?

[u/wildhunt1993]

But ...but ....".it's only possible on PS5 "....damn last year this time around....it was unbearable....when dumb game journalists.....even at IGN were echoing those annoying sony fanboys....

[u/dparks1234]

Really curious to see if the demo can run on a GCN 1.0 Radeon 7970 from 2011. Not that I expect it to work well, but it would be fun to see how a forward-thinking card from 10 years ago holds up. In modern games like Red Dead Redemption 2 the 7970 is much faster than the contemporary GTX680.

[u/FarrisAT]

Is it just me or does TSR have nasty ghosting when spinning or turning? Walking forward I see a little but when I turn it gets so gooey...

[u/Naekyr]

Weird video