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Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

Just played through this on PS5 on a decent OLED. It does not look like this video.

It's impressive, but I'm skeptical this video is real-time on a PS5, certainly I doubt this is at 4K - the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere.

It was worse in the city demo after the action sequence. Certainly a lot going on, but in terms of the trade-off, it was visually quite obvious where the costs are side-by-side with Miles Morales on it's PRT mode and for a real game the later would almost certainly be better overall.

Hopeful people will get more out of it in future, but wanted to temper expectations here from the video.

EDIT: Just found the signpost to enable real-time night mode with Lumen. Wow. It's clearly still struggling to run on a PS5 but it's not that far away from where it would need to be. And when it's not struggling with jaggies/framerate it's pretty jaw-dropping.

View on HN

I also just played this through on a PS5 and an OLED and was blown away. Don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed with a virtual world before.

The moment that drove it home for me was flying up into the sky, striking out in a random direction, flying to the roof of a building and zooming right up to a cluster of pipes and seeing individual rivets accurately modelled. All of this, for a 10 minute demo.

This is a staggering achievement, by all accounts made possible by some pretty amazing new tooling. Genuinely baffled that anyone could fail to be impressed by this.

Edit: don’t forget to open up the menu and play around with the lighting, crowd, AI settings, etc.

Those rivets probably aren't modelled, they'll be reconstructed from volume information in the texture. Which is still impressive and a great way of dealing with that type of geometric detail, but it has limitations, and the engine isn't processing actual models at that level of detail.

You can still do stuff like that in UE4. Have a look at what's possible with Quixel Mixer, you can create detail like that surprisingly quickly. I'd tentatively argue that modelling tools are the real MVP when it comes to increased geometric LOD in modern engines. They allow you to add that kind of detail quickly enough that it becomes economical to actually detail rivets.

Either way, it's very cool. The crowd simulation stuff is going to be useful, current tooling there absolutely sucks outside of a few very expensive dedicated products.

It's very cool. I bet Digital Foundry takes an in-depth look - can't wait.

After reading your comment I went back in to the demo to have another look at the rivets up close. In the options menu, you can switch the viewport so that it shows you the triangles that make up object geometry under the "Nanite" system. Would be interested to hear from anyone with access to the demo and the right background what they make of this.

Edit: I took a couple of screenshots of default view vs Nanite triangles view but not sure what the convention is on HN for where to host them. Happy to put them up if someone can clue me in.

Edit: I've just put the screenshots up [here](https://imgur.com/a/2FMpLJa) and a ~30 sec vid [here](https://youtu.be/s1PUCadh1TU), showing cycling through the viewport modes.

Host them where ever you like, but hopefully something resilient to a hug of death.

I hear tweet threads are really appreciated /s

Replying to myself to add: Digital Foundry [analysis](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-insid...) is now up. They're impressed.

If this UE5 demo is using Nanite, then it really may well just be modeled geometry.

Nanite really blurs the line between geometry and texture - in a sense it’s a shader that uses triangle mesh data as if it were a texture source.

This siggraph session will expand your mind: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw

I stand corrected! Thanks for the link, that's very cool.

Yes. Nanite is very clever. A mesh representation that can be shown at a huge range of levels of detail is what makes it go. Much of the work is moved to asset preprocessing. The actual rendering is simplified. There are about as many triangles being drawn as there are pixels, regardless of scene complexity. If a triangle is bigger than a pixel, it's time to zoom in to a higher LOD for that part of the mesh. If a triangle is much smaller than a pixel, a higher LOD can be used. This is a reduction from O(N) to O(1). So draw time is constant regardless of scene complexity.

Watch the SIGGRAPH video to get the feelings of: that's impossible - oh, I kind of see how that works - one pixel triangles? - how do they get that mesh representation set up right? - oh, graph theory - that data format has to be a pain to generate with all those constraints - they're rendering mostly in the CPU? - that's all that needs to be done at render time? - GPUs need to be redesigned to be a better match to this - how to stream this stuff? - that compression scheme is clever.

>Genuinely baffled that anyone could fail to be impressed by this.

I was much more impressed by Battlefield 2042 graphics when I first saw it. So while this looks "good", may be I was expecting much more. But then again we are limited by Hardware so I guess I have too high of an expectation.

I'm impressed but I think Spider-Man/Miles Morales on the PS5 handle it better. What I gather from this demo is that UE has made these AAA features easily accessible to more developers, and that Nanite means that artists will need to worry less about LOD for the assets they create.

Some downsides, the "metahuman" face modeling isn't great, it seems very uncanny valley compared to titles like The Last of Us II. There's some obvious framerate issues during the car chase scene where I wouldn't be surprised if it dipped into the 20s.

> Some downsides, the "metahuman" face modeling isn't great, it seems very uncanny valley compared to titles like The Last of Us II.

I think each character in last of us 2 is a custom scan and artist creation. Metahumans is made from an amalgam of scans and lets you parameterize the face (adjust everything with sliders) so it is a much harder problem.

> It does not look like this video.

It's always been like that for demos and promo videos. Sometime they straight up run the demo on a PC with crazy specs while pretending it's running a console.

https://imgur.com/a/cagcr

I played through it myself and tbh I think the video doesn't do it justice. I haven't been this blown away in years. Until I got to take over the controls I was utterly convinced there had to be pre-rendered video thrown into the mix.

If you have a compatible console I'd really recommend checking it out!

I played with it for about an hour on an LG C8 55" OLED and was impressed.

I think it is pretty clear there is a level of detail difference between the 'white room' scenes with Neo and the 'city'.

I would be shocked if the 'white room' scenes where not fully motion captured and then transposed into 3D models to run in engine. A bit unfair as while it may be real time rendered it is fully scripted. The player has no control. It is essentially a movie converted into a 3D environment then optimised to hell and back with pixel corrections where needed.

However the 'city' environment is quite stunning with incredible level of detail and you can free roam either walking/driving around the street or fly by. Really quite something to play about with the real time rendering pipeline to see the triangle make up, etc of every object or adjust the position of the sun in the sky, etc.

A lot of fun. Reminded me a lot of when I first got to play Spider-man on the PS4 and just swing around the city. Will be great to see where this leads in a year or two once devs have really had time to get a feel for how everything works.

> I would be shocked if the 'white room' scenes where not fully motion captured

The animations don't look that good to me, nowhere near mocap. The weird arms movements alone scream "video game"

Its possible that it was recorded on dev ps5, those machines are more powerful. And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'.

Marketing people are at it again

Source on dev machines being more powerful?

I wasn't aware that was common practice. I assume this is for ease of playtesting a game before any optimisation phases have happened? I wonder whether it has a setting to convert down to actual PS5 power levels.

> And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'.

Of course. Sigh...

Dont have a direct source, but was told that few times by my gamedev friends who work on those.

...

here i googled it for you

https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/ps5-dev-kit-vs-playstat...

Typically they aren't more powerful, but they have more RAM to assist with debugging

Agreed. I was really hoping they'd release this sort of product on PCs with a "here's what we want in 5 years" level of power. Only high end machines would even be able to run it, but i want to see their vision for future fidelity.

The textures looked super flat to me in this, the world looked decent, but all together i hoped the PS5 was holding their tech down.. because i expected more. Nanite (codename for high model density rendering) examples previously were _much_ better in my view. Eg: https://youtu.be/U-dRBjqAGgI

The video says that it was captured on Xbox series X and PS5. Series X is faster than ps5

Not significantly. In this particular case, they run the demo identically.

Glad you got the settings to work to improve your experience, now also imagine waiting 5 years for developers to really optimize and innovate how they use this engine and the PS5's resources.

Going to be funny listening to elitist PC gamers talk about how inferior everything still looks by then, even though they just play nostalgic pixel art games on Steam all day.

Considering the diff between a pc and ps5 is fairly minimal other than the storage i/o. PCs are already 1-2 gens ahead in CPU and GPU. Any sort of optimizations/tweaks they make for the PS5 are going to be on the PC very quickly as the archs are basically the same. Now I own a lot of different consoles and have in the past built my own PC. However, these days the difference between gaming on a console and PC is so 'same' I have not bothered to buy this generation of consoles (I usually get 30-50 games for each console and generation). The switch is probably the most innovative for this generation. With the xbox and ps5 being hardware locked PC's and some interesting exclusives. But it looks like I am going to be buying uncharted 4 again :)

I'm pretty sure the value proposition is that for $500 you can play state of the art games, compared to $1500 for a pc to do the same. Also not sure what unique benefits the PS5 ssd i/o will have. This is currently not something you can do with consumer pc components

A PS5 and a PC of the same specs is comparable in price. Also a PS5 is currently 1000-1200 depending on bundle. The I/O bit with ps5 is interesting for loadtimes and open world games, though it is getting tougher to buy a PC without nvme. The current xbox looks interesting, but MS is basically pushing 'also release on PC'. Like I said I have owned many generations of consoles. However, this gen I am finding it tough to justify also getting one in addition to my PC. Even the PS4 before it I bought only because of one silly unique game that was not on PC but on every console. Something like the n64 when it came out vs the PC it was a no brainer and 'here take my money'. I am not getting that with this gen of consoles. If you want a console over a PC go for it, seriously. I personally am finding the distinction hard to justify with the current gen of consoles.

"A PS5 and a PC of the same specs is comparable in price." What?. No. A PlayStation 5 digital edition retails for $399.99. What Celeron powered hunk of junk are you able to put together for $399.99?

On which planet this pricing applies ? In Estonia (north-east of Europe) it's 1000 to 1200 USD in the shops.

https://www.hinnavaatlus.ee/1891263/sony-playstation-5-digit...

I would assume he is talking about the US. I would think computer parts are also more expensive in Estonia, not just PS5

Obviously use the pc if you have it. My point is entirely for the case of having neither. It is patently untrue you can get a full pc capable of running ps5 quality games in the price range of a ps5

Pci-e 4 + directsorage hardware decompression can do similar rates. What you can't get is integrated CPU/GPU memory on GPUs this fast, but you can get way faster GPUs and CPUs.

> the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere.

Unfortunately if you watch it on something other than the rendering device you are very likely to be seeing through a video compression/decompression cycle. Providers like YouTube are notorious for rescaling the compression to match the current qualities of the channel. Just a big caveat when looking for rendering artifacts because they may be indistinguishable from compression artifacts.

Note that "playing it on a PS5" is meaningless unless you had demo software. The PS5 has a YouTube player and it's not representative of your in-game experience.

There is an actual demo out you can download: https://store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/10004087/

I do not think they were talking about watching the video on their PS5…

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