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Comment by leshow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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