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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people.

Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of some of the new engine tools: https://youtu.be/ib6_c6uliLg

This is extremely exciting this is possible on a year old console and not a 3090.

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The HN crowd's interest response has been so deadened by constant dopamine flow that they simply cannot be entertained anymore.

"Meh" is the maximum level of emotional response that can be elicited.

The invention of literal time travel, the invention of AGI, or the manufacture of a black hole as an energy source would all be met with mehs. Just a bunch of people dead inside. I still come here for the links and the 5% of comments that are insightful and not pedantic.

Are you implying AGI and time travel is at the same level as improved computer graphics?

No, it was saying that even a fantastic invention would fail to garner enthusiasm.

I would caution against forming judgement on an entire population based on the loudest minority within them. In my experience there seem to be many more reasonable, restrained, and quiet folk out there. Now if the signal to noise ratio in the comments here is trending towards more noise for you, then by all means the comments are less useful and may not be worth the time at some point. But don't confuse the loud cynical voices as being representative for all of us.

No site will ever be judged by the quality of its lurkers.

Your jaded view of HN may or may not be accurate but I think the general HN audience has already built in their expectation that the advancement of computer graphics will continually get better through incremental improvement not to dissimilar from chip development.

Is this impressive? Yes & kudos to the people who built this. Is it life changing in any meaningful measure? Not really...it isn't a scientific breakthrough or complete paradigm shift of understanding that will the lens which you view your existence? Probably not. And expectations of this already happening were built into how I see the steady march of technology development.

This is an incremental instead of step-function change in expectations and was already a pre-ordained outcome. You can argue that my expectations are to high and maybe this came earlier than expected but this isn't some shock to my system.

I suspect that I am not the only one who feels this way.

And if you are part of the team and just feel like people don't appreciate you work - that isn't the case. It is very impressive but it isn't a eureka moment of excitement (at least to me).

If I misunderstand the significance - please guide me to what I am missing here.

To me, the missing significance is that nothing is pre-ordained. As entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, we build the future. The future does not build itself. And if you are a trendline oracle, the trajectory has been better looking games that require ever more development effort and ever more hardware. That trend has been extremely stifling to creativity due to the ever increasing financial investments needed. The promises of this new engine are exciting exactly because they break that trend. It runs on existing commodity hardware and achieves much better results than everything released on that hardware so far and with less development effort. Computer graphics are not going to solve anyone’s existential questions, but they are a significant creative tool across many art forms and better tools that require less effort to achieve better results are only a good thing for the creative industry, just like cheap digital cameras and editing software democratized filmmaking.

I don't disagree with you I disagree with the follow-up comment from the previous poster about it being 'meh'.

Nothin is pre-ordainer for sure, that said there certainly seem to be fairly clear directions in technology. I think what was missing from my understanding is that this is a much more efficient use of resources for a better engine. Sounds like a leap forward in graphics engine (now developers will be captured on the Unreal Engine - great business model for the company).

It still isn't a eureka moment that the other poster was really hoping for. Its very impressive but I am not going to swoon over the achievements. That doesn't make me "dead inside" because I can't get fully amped up for this post and I think that the poster missed how people might view look at this development which is why I added my own comments.

I think people were pretty blown away by the mRNA vaccines for example.

I dont think neither year old console or a 3090 is any form of "consolation".

Also while i agree on principle with you, this is still a movie, and one of a trilogy that defined a significant part of culture i might add, so it's a risky move at best.

But yeah, besides facial quality(which i think are vastly underwhelming) the movie looks pretty nice, and the rest doesn't even matter when you consider most of movies/shows today are VFX.I remember seeing the first ever UE5 tech demo years ago(i think it predates ray-tracing if i'm not mistaken) and i was kind of surprised.

70 people is rather a lot.

It’s all relative as Einstein once said.

Depends on what they all do I suppose. For a franchise tie in, there were probably a lot of people not doing the actual content production.

For AAA quality? Not that many I think. Sure it's not a game but then production wasn't for as long either.

I don’t know, i was kind of blown away by the length of the end credits screen in call of duty. I reckon there were several thousand names listed there.

Fwiw this demo is on another level than call of duty. The world feels huge, extremely busy - there’s cars and people everywhere - and so varied.

> Fwiw this demo is on another level than call of duty. The world feels huge, extremely busy - there’s cars and people everywhere - and so varied.

Indeed, but the truth is it's just a demo, now when you add all the rest that's needed to make a real game you start to have issues that woudn't have with a demo.

I remember reading that the end credits of Red Dead Redemption 2 was something like 7000 people

Red Dead Redemption II (PS4) Credits

7318 people (4132 developers, 3186 thanks)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/red-dead-redemp...

The real excitement will come when it does not require a new $3000 graphics card to run on the home PC I already spent $1500 on...

The price of keeping up with every new enhancement on PC is directly linked to each new engine update, but somehow game releases can be "optimized" for gameplay on ~3 year old consoles... Also why I haven't bought any new PC games since GTA5.

The demo runs on consoles.

This is a console demo, not a PC demo (unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it). It runs on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S which cost 500 USD.

The PS5 is $500 if you can find it, there's been shortages for over a year, the effective price is $900 on Ebay where you can actually get one without waiting.

You can get one off r/hardwareswap for MSRP usually and is delivered within a few days

This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.

I managed to get two, a digital (€400) and a Blu-ray model (€500) a few weeks ago from Carrefour here in [redacted].

It is a bit of a pain having to monitor stock drops but most online stores have a queue system in place as well as purchase limits to try and make life harder for people that buy up every console they have to just put them on eBay at twice the price.

A colleague of my wife managed to get a PS5 in a fnac store a few weeks ago as well. Just went in randomly and asked and they had them in stock. Only a few and they sell out quick so was just luck in that instance but if you put in a little effort you can get one in a week or two (depending on stock allocation of course) without having to pay over the MRSP.

And that is the super exciting, mind blowing thing about this, this ran on the Xbox Series X/PS5! In fact, it even runs on then Xbox Series S with a small visual downgrade, which is the cheap version with 1/3 the GPU power of the Series X (at 4 tflops, it is perhaps very roughly equivalent to a GTX 1060 from 2016). This is a triumph of software, not hardware. I imagine you should be getting a lot of use still out of your current rig.

> This is a triumph of software, not hardware

Purpose built gaming hardware has significant advantages over a typical PC. Modern consoles have SoC designs with incredible bandwidth between CPU/GPU/RAM that you simply can't have on upgradable form factors.

The closest thing in the general purpose computing world are the M1 family of SoC MacBooks. UMA on the M1 in particular could be harnessed to have physics and graphics geometry in sync with each other without the penalty of bus transport - so things like high-detail deformable environments become much more feasible. But again, even these machines are geared towards general purpose computing, not graphics.

> Modern consoles have SoC designs with incredible bandwidth between CPU/GPU/RAM that you simply can't have on upgradable form factors.

So where's the PC platform with these advantages? I mean, most PC players will replace their whole system instead of upgrade individual components (anecdotal / speaking for myself). Where's the PC-like-a-console?

I guess the Steam Deck will be the one to look out for. But I would also expect gaming laptops to have those advantages.

The PC market has found a local maxima that prevents it from getting there.

You need the CPU, GPU, motherboard, and RAM to be one product shipped by one company, but instead you've got a CPU from Intel, a GPU from AMD/Nvidia, a motherboard from the PC manufacturer, and off the shelf RAM.

"Gamers" want an Intel CPU because of the branding (although this is shifting towards AMD now), they want a particular graphics card because of branding, they may even care about the specific motherboard and/or RAM.

Apple are able to do this console-like integration and performance because their target market don't care enough about each individual component, the Mac is the product and the brand they get behind. PS5 owners aren't buying it because of the brand of CPU.

I don't think it's brand loyalty on the part of end customers, it's just unlikely and difficult for a number of large vendors to coordinate on such a project. You would need motherboard, CPU and GPU designers to take a long bet on a new form factor, while also cutting their bottom line (SoCs require less components and better performance for money)

I think the speed advantage would be one welcomed by the average PC user, and if Intel aren't already colluding to make an answer to M1, they're heading towards extinction

Do you really need that much bandwidth between cpu and gpu? On a pc the the gpu has its own memory and the memory bandwidth of for example a 3070 is greater than the memory bandwidth of Xbox.

Would this demo not run on a pc?

I understand that pc hardware is more expensive but it was also my understanding that performance ceiling is actually much higher than consoles, especially after the next gen of pc hardware comes out after a console release.

It’s hard to tell how much more expensive a pc is because of console manufacturers’ loss leader accounting.

CPU and GPU are good at different tasks, but transferring any amount of data across the PCI bus is pretty expensive, forcing you to use both in a suboptimal way. If you have fast enough data transfer between them then you can do SIMD-like tasks much faster on the GPU, while doing a lot of tasks that naturally involve branching faster on the CPU, using whichever processor is faster and has spare capacity instead of whichever has the data.

This is correct. CPUs are better suited for arbitrary execution (e.g., physics, game logic, networking) whereas the GPU is suited to highly organized data structures and massively parallel computation. Things that require dynamic effects can benefit greatly from reducing dispatch times between GPU/CPU. UMA, as featured on M1 and the PS4, permit almost instantaneous transfer, save for cache coherency issues. The nexus of real time physics solvers and graphics rendering I think is the next step in taking advantage of SoC and UMA

Ok but in practice what can you do on console that you can’t do on pc?

I mean you could run a database or a spreadsheet on a console, but it wouldn't be a good fit. The benefits of a console are the price-to-performance ratio for gaming applications, whereas the trade-offs on PCs are geared toward general purpose computing and browser speed. And as I've explained a few times in other threads, SoC and UMA architectures permit certain types of processing (such as destructible/deformable environments) to become feasibly performant. Ultimately a console process everything as a PC can, and vice versa, it's just consoles are more performance tuned for gaming, and the other has to cater for the lowest common denominator.

One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly. We used to bake content and design code with specific cache line sizes in mind. If you know you have a fixed memory budget for graphics/sound/etc you can make specific tradeoffs on where you spend that budget. PCs until recently did not have UMA and so you were bound by bus speeds(although this applied to some consoles too but you could exploit it if you knew how, ex: stream audio data from graphics memory and long as you stayed under the total bus bandwidth you got extra memory for the system if you needed it).

> One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly

With UE5, it's the engine that tunes the rendering quality for the HW available.

I have found I don't update my PC for years but the games just keep looking better. A lot of newer techniques, Raytracing excluded, seem to be much more efficient at making good looking models without much geometry. It's all shaders, decals and image maps. Running a 1080p monitor helped that alot. I recently upgraded to a 1440p, and it has cost me frames no doubt.

> Raytracing excluded

about that - screen space ray tracing has been around a while, and even if you miss little things (no diffusion from lights off screen or behind a shade) the resulting eyecandy is often enough to trick people mind even if it's not physically correct... and three generation older hardware is more than enough to run that.

GPUs are $3000 because of Bitcoin, not Unreal Engine.

Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console.

I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has been floating around.

And the tech like nanite & lumen. It's not as if you can just "turn it off" and pick up a bunch of performance. It seems like you have to develop your game with these tools in mind.

In general I think the new consoles are going to have some trouble, even today games don't render at native 4k, they render much lower then get upsampled, and dynamic resolution is also in place to pick up the slack. The promise of 4k/60fps on a console is kind of smoke and mirrors.

IMO 4k/60fps as a goal is overrated. 3k upscaled to 4k using a newer generation upscaler is not going to look much worse than native 4k, especially when viewed on a TV at a typical distance from one's couch. And 60fps, while crucial in some genres, is not altogether that important in others (particularly narrative-focused single-player titles, for which Unreal Engine is often used especially among non-major publishers).

60fps as a goal is vastly underrated. We should absolutely be aiming for decent framerates.

The 'golden age' arcade games of the early 80s mostly ran at 60fps. And this trend continued in the arcades, with the most impressive early-90s 3D games also choosing framerate over detail, which was absolutely the right decision for Daytona USA, Sega Rally, Ridge Racer, and more. A solid 60fps pretty much defined 'arcade quality'.

It's understandable that early 3D home consoles had to aim a bit lower. But we're now on the 5th generation of 3D home console, and we're still making excuses to run at lower framerates than games of the 80s/90s?

But 4K, that just game too soon. Every recent generation of console has struggled to keep up with the rate of screen resolution increase. And 4K was a huge jump, from the 2 million pixels of 1080p to around 8 million pixels.

We could have been happy with 1080p for a lot longer if we'd had solid 60fps gaming with a bit more antialiasing, and streaming services with higher bitrates.

High-DPI screens are great if you're reading text off them at close range. But not really needed at a normal TV-watching or gaming distance.

I completely agree and don't get why you're being downvoted. With fast-paced games it's even hard to notice the difference between 1440 and 4k. I'll take 60/90/144 fps over "true 4k" any day.

4k maybe, but 60fps should be the minimum going forward IMO. Or at the very least a 60fps option in all games.

I think 30fps is a straight up usability issue. The only times I've ever had motion sickness or a headache from games is when the game is 30fps (though not all 30fps games gave me these issues)

I hope the performance/quality modes become standard this generation.

I'm not trying to crap on upsampling, it's going to be critical to get decent fidelity in modern games.

I think you're wrong about frame rate though. I find 30fps unplayable. Also, people have had a taste for it. They have been playing 60fps titles since launch on the next gen consoles, it makes the frame rate all the more strange when you play something running at half that.

Not sure what you are talking about with games using unreal engine. It's also used for shooters, Gears of war is one of the flagship unreal titles. I'm sure the folks at unreal don't want people to think "the engine isn't for shooters".

At least some iterations of Gears of War do run at 30fps.

I'm sure the folks at unreal don't want people to think "the engine isn't for shooters".

Especially considering the engine originated from shooters -- Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

If I am running a game at under 60 fps or less I probably will assume something is wrong. I feel pretty bad if I sit and stare at a low fps game too long. 4k I do not give a rats ass about however.

We probably won't get consoles having games of this fidelity on current hardware, but at the very least this shows that this level of fidelity is coming. Next gen consoles and high end PCs will at the very least be able to achieve that. I find that exciting.

If AI upscale is undistinguishable for the average gamer I really don't see to problem. I much rather have 4k 120fps using AI upscale then full hd 30fps without it.

I don't think this is using a DLSS technique of AI upsampling, but rather a more traditional algorithmic approach like AMD's FXR uses. I'm not saying upsampling isn't good, it's going to be absolutely critical to get this kind of thing running. I was just saying there is some nuance to the 4k/60fps claim of many titles.

"It's really cool" is severely downplaying the achievement here. It's like you got a 1st gen jetpack for christmas and you're complaining it doesn't have enough horsepower.

The fact that this runs in real time, at 30fps, on a $400 console is mind blowing. It's even able to downscale to a smooth 1080p/30 on the Xbox S. You would not dream of achieving this level of fidelity 5 years ago, there is nothing out there that compares. Nanite & lumen are the reason it performs so well, not the other way around.

On top of that, the promise of 4k/60 on PCs still hasn't been met. You can spend $3-4k and still barely achieve that with a 3090. This engine might be the first to actually get there.

I agree. What a Series X (what we've got, can't talk to PS5 as I haven't seen it) can output is just mind boggling when considering the price.

Sure my AUD $6K PC is faster (with a multi core overclocked Ryzen, and 3070, fast memory, PCIE4 NVME storage, premium case/mobo/power/cooling), but at $750 what you get blows my mind. You'll struggle to match it at 3x the price in a custom built PC, and that was with pre hike GPU prices.

This demo was made on the unfinished engine with a team of less than 100 people in less than a year. Once this is the hands of bigger studios with longer schedules and even more optimized I think you'd be surprised.

Considering that the exact same demo can run on the Series S (1/3 the rendering power) with barely a visual downgrade shows that we will absolutely be hitting these visuals on Series X/PS5 as 60fps and temporally upscaled 4k. 60fps will no doubt be a major design goal of the engine, so even if their current “wow” demos are targeting 30fps, finished games will look quite close to this and absolutely hit 60fps. I agree that this is a marketing demo, but it’s a playable one and does a lot to answer prior skepticism about UE5. As end consumers, we can feel free to remain skeptical till we see the first fished game, but the aim here is to sell the engine to game devs and they are the skeptics that will need to be won over before any consumers will see finished games.

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