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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

On one hand it is great Unreal is being used in many places outside Gaming from VR, VFX, Movie production or anything to do with 3D / Photorealistic Graphics.

On the other hand there are some recent backlash suggesting these direction and default in Unreal is making games look worst. [1] [2] And Nanite may not be the silver bullet we were looking for.

[1] https://www.vg247.com/unreal-engine-5-has-been-a-disappointm...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4

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These remarks are hilarious.

Nanite was never supposed to be a silver bullet but a way to enable high density mesh streaming and high fidelity shadows and lighting when used with Lumen. Both techniques work incredibly well.

The only valid criticism is games getting too expensive (to make) and frame generation can work against gameplay. But both are really up to game designers to use appropriately, not engine providers to dictate.

The only real argument I see is "Lumen is bad." It would be pretty hard to work in an alternative GI but Nanite and the upscalers are optional.

It is not- it is a tremenous relief. If Lumen doesnt fit your needs you can go back to light baking which of course nobody wants to.

1's argument seems to mostly be that shader stuttering is bad in UE5, which doesn't have much to do with UE5... shader stuttering is really bad in lots of UE4-based games and non-Unreal games too, it's a plague that affects most modern high-spec games and driver stacks. If you think stuttering is bad in UE5 games try playing a WebGL or WebGPU based high fidelity game.

I'm not really sure what the alternative here is supposed to be anyway. Is it Unity? Godot isn't a realistic competitor yet for this level of fidelity, though it'll probably get there eventually.

There's no alternative. Its just rage/click bait. The shader issue is cross engine and the solution is the same across engine...warm up the shaders before gameplay.

Valve has a fun solution for the Steam Deck, which is shipping pre-compiled shaders for your device across the wire that get installed along with the game. I'm curious to see whether that will become more widespread eventually.

I assume other Steam Deck like hardware which is a fixed target could support it, apparently the Legion Go S is going to ship with Steam OS rather than Windows.

On PC hardware it seems unlikely, more chance of Epic fixing their engine.

Yeah the fixed hardware is key here. The PS5 doesn’t have to compile shaders at app launch time either.

That's still pre-warming. Sometimes you can target hardware and do it at dev time but its the essentially the same process.

Even if true, still - unification of efforts across multiple industries will create more value and synergies in the long run compared to narrow optimisations.

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