It's not that it's a bargain, or a good value for the price. The title of the video is "Why Unreal Engine 5.1 is a Huge Deal".
Without the word "Huge" it comes across rather differently.
This really is a huge deal.
For gamers: Unreal 5.0 removed the awkward transitions between low and high poly assets, but removing the need for low and high poly assets (called Levels of Detail or 'LOD' s) at all. The engine just works out how many polys are necessary.
But 5.0 didn't do this for foliage - so trees and shrubs and forests look crappy when you zoom out.
5.1 does this for foliage.
So you can now...
See the forest from the trees.
(sunglasses emoji)
I saw this video on my youtube recommended and man am I glad they're figuring out how to phase out billboarding. One of my pet peeves in video games is pop-in and billboarding of far objects.
-visible banding, especially in skies, in some games, which is very possible even with 24 bit color in this types of gradients, sometimes the monitor itself can cause it too. Dithering should fix this (24-bit color dithering should be almost unnoticeable), since banding looks so ugly this would be a great fix.
-textures that repeat themselves. Even in some modern games like Cyberpunk 2077, you'll e.g. see a repeated pattern of reflective rain water on road surfaces. Imho, have 2-4 varitions of the same texture and use a pseudorandom pattern to tile them, that completely eliminates this. Even if it's 4x lower resolution to have 4 variations in the same amount of memory it'd look better.
-round things (barrels, round tables, a goblet, ...) that look like a blocky polygon instead of a circle, in games with otherwise incredible amounts of details. Either use more triangles, or, I wish these were a thing, quadratic surfaces. In games that are low detail in general this matters less, in those it fits the style.
Fix those things, and several immersion breakers would be gone!
Use this one weird trick to fix that.[1]
The theory: [2]
This can be done in the GPU, so you only need one copy of the repeating texture in VRAM. It's good for semi-random patterns such as dirt, gravel, water, grass, asphalt, forest floors, etc. Not good for regular patterns such as bricks and tiles.
[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/20206840/174149327...
Yep pop-in within natural environments is one of the last big immersion breakers. Fly or climb to what should be a majestic view and suddenly fake-looking trees spoil everything.
That could be the cause
I guess the cases where it does the right thing are not noticeable, and that's why I only see the bad cases. Are there examples where HN title rewriting did something good, or cases where before HN did this titles were very bad or clickbaity?
Wondering about that is why I bothered to comment at all. I assumed there must be some logical-but-not-quite-working reason. :-D
Foliage without pop in and into Nanite is cool, but Nanite still has work to be done on (AFAIK you still cannot deform and animate Nanite assets). Lumen advances to get translucent materials working is massive. Large worlds is super cool. And I can't remember if it's in 5.1 in beta, but it brings a new layering model for complex materials that works better than clear coat (which is the current 2-layer model, like a car with blue paint and a protective layer on top) with many more possibilities.
Putting those abilities into the hands of anyone is a massive thing (well, putting all of UE5). I've seen firsthand people with absolutely no experience in gamedev but in other media production get up to speed with building environments in less than a week, complete with animations & all. Making small virtual worlds is available to basically anyone.
And yes, the author of the video has a target audience of people who already use Unreal Engine. To these people, 5.1 is pretty damn massive.