No ones rewriting that much but yes, studios do fork the engine and make it their own. If you’re using stock Unreal (or any off the shelf game engine really) you’re doing it wrong. Unless you’re building an engine from scratch, nothing out there is gonna be tailored to your own specific use case, so you’re gonna end up making changes to fit your game.
There was one guy on the team who was essentially a wizard and did a LOT of optimization for the game. He managed to get it running on Vita, with all of the huge crowds of zombies and everything.
This is, to some extent, less infrequent than we expect. Singular talents go a long way in intellectually demanding activities; it's just easier to see in programming, where you often find people who are literally worth 10x the median and sometimes 100x.
@@Bloo_Void Yeah, I don’t think the guy who told me was supposed to, either. But his name is on the chalkboard in the school, where a bunch of members of staff were invited to write on the board because they didn’t know what to put on it.
Days Gone looks spectacular on PS5 and I remember it looked great even on the PS4 Pro, but that's only because Bend Studio used their expertise to build their own optimization techniques (like the video says), now my question is, why are multi-million dollar companies relying solely on the third party engine they lease/hire instead of building their own optimization techniques? Where do they invest all those years of development if all they do is record the voice lines and do the mo-cap? I mean, I am no developer but I know there is more than simple "modeling" to developing a AAA game.
Great comment. RE: Now my question is, why are multi-million dollar companies relying solely on the third party engine they lease/hire instead of building their own optimization techniques? It cost money and there is no market incentive for these studios. As discussed at the end of our dynamic lighting video, games can do exceedingly well using all the stock technologies in unreal because most consumers will just accept them without thinking twice(until the creation on this studio and it's videos). Epic Games' Fortnite thrives despite utilizing all of UE's excessively mediocre aspects. The aspects relating to both performance and quality such as their auto lods, noisy shaders, stutters, etc.
@@ThreatInteractiveyour answer is basically spot on. But it’s also funny, because of one specific publisher. Square Enix. Notoriously known for crazy budgets and crazy sales expectations… they still let their studios create new engines. A lot was spent on, what is now know as, final fantasy 15’s game engine (Luminous). But even funnier is that it basically had to get completely rewritten because the game was originally for the ps3, but issues with dev meant the ps4 was coming out real soon. And so they had to remake and improve it for modern consoles. And, guess what, their other recent final fantasy game (14 online) also had a propriety engine. This though did get modified and used for final fantasy 16, which had a lot of people who worked on 14, also work on it. So this makes sense, due to the teams familiarity with the engine. But yeah, for a publisher hell bent on profits like any other, they’ve splurged on propriety engine (one which hasn’t even been touched with since despite its long development). Edit: oops. Was wrong about luminous engine. Got used for the FF7 remake and sequel (and probably the rest of the remake), and Forspoken. And while not used for 16, aspects of it like it’s shaders we’re implemented.
some quite good looking games came to light before 2018. A 4090 should effortlessly run taht quality. Stalker 2 (ue5) is suffering, guess they just default every setting in the engine and launched the game. Throne and Liberty I believe most (or all?) of it was made on ue4. The time of day lighting on that game is flawless, really outstanding creation. I sense major bs in the industry.
yeah i remember playing this one on 1080p with the high settings using a i7 3770 and gtx1650 super and i was completely blown away with how the graphics looks like while providing a constant 60fps. days gone is a great example of a well optimized game under a messy engine.
I also have a 1650 Super(Ryzen 5 3600) and I just experienced this game a couple months ago(Fantastic experience btw). I was geniunely surprised by how well it ran considering how good it looked. Sucks that optimization is just an afterthought nowdays.
@@AlrafiHaider-nc3nc Glad you enjoyed it dude. such an underrated game tbh. I just don't understand why are companies cheapening on graphic programmers, while the latter can literally make the game work on x2 or even x3 user hardwares. the "AAA game = beefy rig" needs to end or at least settle down a bit.
This technique is based on the Crytek technique from CryEngine, created a years ago. Crytek also achieved very good looking RayTracing which doesn't need RTX, even before RTX was everywhere.
NVIDIA didn't invent ray tracing, they invested a lot of research into it and created RTX. DXR is a commonly used non-proprietary ray tracing system that's used in a lot of games.
@@arclitegames RTX is just branding on Nvidia's hardware capability, in reality all games are using either. DXR, Vulkan RT, or their own in house non standard method. dont be confused by solutions like RTXGI or RTXDI these are merely pre-package concrete implementations that themselves utilize DXR or Vulkan RT in order to function. the idea of RTX as its own competeing API standard is a misunderstanding from like 6 years ago.
@@MGrey-qb5xz A Hat in Time was released in 2017 and uses Unreal Engine 3 (an engine from 2006) and DirectX 9 and it looks and plays great. Clearly the dev preferred shaping the engine themselves and didn't need to use any features from a newer unreal.
@@blisphul8084 same thing, the unreal engineers are paid to pretty much add in new stuff rather then priorities the bugs the devs constantly complain about so just fine tuning your own version works better
@@MGrey-qb5xz Probably Godot is the way forward, given that it is FOSS and gives control to the developers. An engine by game devs for game devs, rather than a company that only has user metrics to go off of.
to this day i remember Days Gone's PC port as one of the most beautiful and incredibly well optimized games. even at the time nothing could compare, it's just straight up performed 30-40% better on my hw than any other game.
@@doltBmB doing well? So where are the games (and yikes at Crysis 4, who asked for another title for that trash franchise?)? The growing indie/dev community? Influx of new, up-to-date documentation? Do they have an equivalent visual scripting system that allows anyone to create entire games without programming background like Blueprints does?
@@wallacesousuke1433 cryengine pioneered visual scripting before unreal copied it yes, but using it for an entire game is stupid and bad and part of the reason why unreal runs like shit
Community shaders is a great alternative to ENB. It's not at the same level as ENB yet, but ENB is going to crash and burn because Boris Vorontsov is a giant asshole.
I'm a newbie dev (day 3 of doing ue5+blender stuff) and I'm loving all this stuff. I feel like absorbing content like this can guide me to having really solid resume projects. Potentially developing some small game.
i've just binged all your videos and im so glad more people are speaking about this im so sick and tired of horrendous looking games that make me physically sick if i play more than an hour until you fulfill your goal to be able to make your own modified unreal engine i hope that you would make a video teaching beginner ue5 users how to remove all the bs from the engine and make it playable
For the first time in my life, I saw a game where I didn't experience fps drops and stutters when I entered the tunnel. That was Days Gone. Despite being an open world, this game has excellent optimization.
I remember working with cryengine 3, compared to unreal 4 the amount of rendering optimization options it gave was weird for me given my perception of cryengine being "heavy", without sacrificing things like dynamic lighting, specially their newer voxel based dynamic lighting, its 1/5th of performance cost of lumen but looks soo good.
I really appreciate these videos as a counter balance to all the "ohhh, look at the new fancy unreal feature!" As a solo indie dev using unreal, i would love some form of resource with guidance on some settings to change. I have already disabled nanite, lumen and virtual shadow maps for a big bump in performance (in a highly realistic game). If there are any other easy and obvious fixes that doesn't require extreme knowledge and custom code (unless its a plugin or an easy toggle) that would be highly appreciated!
I don't use contact shadows in unreal engine. Not necessarily because of temporal dependency, but because of subsurface color self shadowing. Leafs normally scatter the light when illuminated from the backside, but screen space shadows turn this lighting off because each leaf casts a shadow on itself.
Subscribed, thanks to you I was able to figure out what the hell was making my games like Rust and Battlefield 2042 look like a grainy mess. In both cases it was TAA, I've since upgraded my computer and really spent some time on the settings to shave off any unnecessary details that kill FPS, induce latency and blur. The current combo of 9800x3d at 5.4ghz and 7900xtx with +8 power adjustment is right at 200 FPS Native with TAA turned OFF or Low when that's not an option. This is at 1440p on a LG Widescreen @ 240hz. Now that the latency is super low and FPS very high without any BS attempting to blur jaggies, I can finally track other quick moving players with ease and that's saying a lot for a 50 year old lifetime gamer.
As much criticisms Sony and PS get (which are usually well deserved), one that they definitely shouldn’t get is their 1st party studios optimization. They produce games that somehow look next gen while not being next gen (like Horizon 2). And while maybe not at 60fps like the PS5 can, still play at a locked 30 with very clear image. Granted, they have the unique situation of only having to develop and optimize for one hardware, but it still goes to show how far these machines can be pushed. And I, like others feel that the current gen hasn’t reached it fully yet. We got some amazing looking ones like Horizon 2’s dlc which is a PS5 only (for good reasons), Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank RA. But even then, it feels like it can go further.
I beat Days Gone 100% on Steam Deck, a 15 Watt HANDHELD device. The game runs at a nice 40-45 fps except when entering large settlement camps/cities due to CPU overhead where it drops into 30s, but honestly with FSR scaling on and medium settings the game runs AMAZINGLY even with large hordes on your screen and dozens of zombies and explosions going on. Prettiest game I've run on my deck and a great experience
Aren't you interested in immersion at _all?_ You can't even imagine how much of a game's experience you are missing out on by playing on such a device with such a tiny screen.
Days Gone is a truly underrated game...If Sony made Days Gone 2 Insated of that not-so-good concord they would; 've been made millions not lost millions...Days Gone is one of my favourite games of all time even the PS4 version can put shame on the many PS5 games
This is why I wonder if CD project red really did a good thing switching from a personal graphics engine to something like unreal who doesnt endorse optimization
The work youre doing is incredible. Keep making videos, youre getting pushed to recommended pages and stuff. Its working. Id hoghly recommend trying to do a collab with popular techtubers. You have some heat on you atm, some that are bigger than youd expect might be willing to make a vid with you to catch the hype. Just am idea.
They used high frequency colors to set a floor that can be easily seen and calculated for further rendering, sharpness, then added a depth material map to indicate shadows, lighting, wow!
Considering you used footage of Horizon, could you make a case/comparison as to why Horizon on release was badly optimized compared to Death Stranding despite both having been developed on the Decima Engine?
can you make a video on 1080p monitors, are they fine with modern gaming where their native resolutions are either 720 or 1080p but upscaled or if they are upsampled from 648p to 1440p?
We have some content lined up, but we definitely need to make a video disseminating the "Your monitor is blurry" response when someone points out Temporal SS/AA issues. Thanks for the suggestion!
i just got into graphic programming as interest to optimize ue5 and every fiber in my body wants to give up already. this shit is so unique no wonder computer graphics has its own branch inside computer science
My problem with screen-space effect is the artefact they all share, idk if its because im working a lot with pathtracer and my eye got trained to see real global illumination, shadow, reflection and ambient occlusion. But the fact that all of the effects disappear on the edge of my screen, edge of my character on third person games and worst of them all screen space reflections completely fading when the object goes out of the "screen-space" triggers me so much that i am willing loosing 30 fps enabling ray-tracing rather than seeing those artefacts, I know they are very cheap to render, but i just can't stand them.
Screen space "reflections" aren't even real reflections. With a few exceptions, I've never been O.K. with screen space fakery, and especially not S.S.R. after I had been accustomed to true reflections in PC games going back to Unreal.
I have no idea what youre saying or who you are but i hate how lazy and shit modern games are getting so i 100% support everything you say and do. Theres literslly no reason Onimusha dawn of dreams on the ps2 should look better than some modern "AAA" titles
I bake depth maps in Blender using a fog pass. I am currently working on my own solo developed game and am using unreal. I am very new to unreal so I have a question, can't you import the depth map from your 3D software? I actually won't be doing this because my game isn't realistic but im curious
It used UE? Heh, could have fooled me, it looked very nice and sharp, noticeably better then some PS5 gen games. (Played on PC@high settings, not sure about consoles visuals)
Hey you seem to be the right guy to ask this, is it still the fact that small, especially long thin triangles are a big no-no for 3d models? Is there still a similar 2x2 block size problem with them?
Definitely, but it also relates to the distance those triangles are to the view. You can find a nice visualization of how bad thin and small tris are for quads in this video clip: ruclips.net/user/clipUgkxjA3U9QCrDi-10s-W_OKrz0k5mHh7mg3y?si=iWOZLINskuJ-8bvx
Honestly just go back to PS2 tricks. Just brute force a trick like textures, lightning. Look at Mirrors Edge from 2008. Yes its all pre-baked, but who cares, it looks amazing.
So the main problem is 4k, along with the Xbox SS... Unfortunately, I don't see everyone switching back to 1080p, even with AA. Also, DLSS 1080p->4k upscaling is pretty costly. Not seeing a great solution here. Checkerboarding sucked, as well. If only TVs were 1440p... Also, these games use high-res/high-poly assets which do not look good, greatly diminishing returns.
I'd like to hear your solution for those problems, how do you sell a '4k' experience on slow hardware? With Moore's law slowing, at this rate it'll take another decade just to catch up to 4k.
@@themodfather9382 I thought everybody loved checkerboarding. I don't use consoles though. Anyway, if a person loves gaming, he should spend what he needs to spend in order to get a proper experience. It's no different than any hobby. Buy the GPU that delivers your target resolution and framerate. Prices are ridiculous now, but GPUs also last twice as long as they did six years ago. Look at the cost, not the price. If a GPU is $1000 and you use it for 4 years, that's a _cost_ of $20.80 a month. Anyone in a first-world country can afford $21/mo. as part of a hobby.
IMO unreal engine 4 was better than 5. Unreal engine 3 has same issues as unreal engine 5 today. UE3 was not running well on PC and console. It was hard to make games on it as well. But by 2010 the engine issues were ironed out and UE4 came out as relatively light game engine which run well on most hardware. With UE5 epic is doing the same mistake as UE3. But the only thing is UE4 looked like 90% of UE5.
You should do a tutorial on how to actually optimize a game you make in Unreal Engine. Your videos are great but to newcomers like me it just flies over my head. Like I understand the words you are saying but my brain cant visualize it or put it into practice.
They should just return to bumpmaps instead of creating each nonsense as a detailed object with detailed not compressed textures, it's pintless, you won't even notice that some nonsense above your head has high polygon real model.
Of course you can make your games look better by working around complex issues with simple solutions. But the future is simply raytracing, no matter how smart you want to make yourself look. Devs will move to Raytracing not to make games look better but to reduce the cost of creating a game. Which is far more important for them than creating a smooth running product that looks great while not running poorly. It's not in their interest. It is in their interest that we spend both more money on hardware and on their games. So optimization only happens extensively when devs want to make a for example competetive title that 90 % of gamers should be able to play at 60 fps or more. You see exactly that happening in most cases. However, when that is simply not the case there is hardly a reason to sacrifice any graphics for performance and at the same time spend more time making it look close to the unperformant version. It's simply pointless.
Noise does not look "better" and it's also dependant on the target hardware. If the quality on 9th gen consoles looks bad, that foundational quality trickles back down to PC gaming.
What a stupid comment! You don't need this rt crap to achieve dynamic GI. Cryengine has its own SVOTI solution which looks excellent and works way better than any other, and they developed it 10 years ago. Lumen is similar, but not even close in terms of performance to SVOTI. Cryengine also use this Screen Space Shadows technique.
No it's not, this uses a high map to calculate shadows on a surface, but it's usually used together with a normal map. I used this in 2 projects. It's old tec but if it's used correctly it can look very good, I saw it first in a Nvidia tech demo 2004 if I remember correctly.
Great Question. Most *Screen Space Ambient Occlusion* project *soft* darkness based on scene depth and this causes plausibility issues because in real life, AO is more related to our lighting scenario so in graphic terms it would be more related to *global illumination.* In fact you'll find some terms in graphic community calling AO a poor man's GI. SS-Shadows projects micro or "non-shadow map included info" as shadow like(sharp opposed to soft) detail by using values outside of screen space like *offscreen light information.* Because Days Gone used material shaders that altered the geometric depth buffer, SSAO will also be affected. Screen space directional occlusion (SSDO) combines SSAO with global illumination information but we haven't seen too many examples of that method.
And of course it’s a Sony exclusive that had to be optimized unlike the 3rd party drivel out there. This is primarily why I’m for platform exclusives despite them locking out those outside the platform. The closest thing to “optimized” we’re ever going to get.
@@MGrey-qb5xz Well, RT, for the most part, relies heavily on temporal accumulation. Meaning that it's not exactly compatible with a temporally-independent approach to rendering. Unless you use a separate denoiser, I guess. But most devs just rely on the temporal pass.
This can be used in combination. For RT shadows to produce the detail found on these flat textures, it would require expensive overdraw inducing(dense/overly high poly) meshes. You can also exclude objects from RT inclusion to save performance. Days Gone SS shadows and depth shaders mitigate performance problems by avoiding overdraw in both the main view render and shadow map. If using RT, we are still saving performance in the *main view render.*
Would explain why they had to backdown on the mass of the zombie hords ... wich was like the one and *ONLY* selling point of the game as the story was horrendeous ... it's litterally Forest Gump the video game ... like fr fr. go watch a short cut summary of the story it is 1to1, and there are way better zombie games out there, especially weird about it was, how our boy here allways plays game chars that have a "sorta Girlfriend" allways out of reach for what ever reasons and wich they are willing to die for wihout ever even getting laid with them ... I don't get it. Weird Patttern Recognition
*They didn't make that game,* Collation did. And they had to make serious engine changes that no versions of the engines includes. EDIT: Let's get things straighten out, the most realistic GOW game released as of now(GOW 5) was NOT made by Epic. The GOW games produced by Epic look like games and VERY dated in comparison with other studios attempts with the realism (with the same hardware limitations). It's comedic to even consider Epics GOW titles as "realistic".
@@ThreatInteractive huh? Epic Games developed the original gears trilogy. The coalition were formed after the fact to continue the series starting with the Gears 1 remake
Sure, the Gears franchise got their own art direction of sorts. But skin shaders, materials and environments individually had a realistic approach to them, and certainly looked impressive on the xbox 360 back in the day.
it runs really well on pc, days gone is one of the only games in recent times that looks this good and runs 120+ fps on 1440p max for me. alot of other games ive played that dont look nearly as good struggle to get even 60
@@patek2385 *"The game has problems with constant framerate, it stutters when traveling."* 1. What is your CPU, GPU, and OS? 2. What resolution were you rendering? 3. What were your settings?
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
"Powered by Unreal"
Devs: "actually we had to rewrite like a half of it..."
Every. Single. Time.
Nothing wrong with that imo
at that point we might as well call it a custom engine. they are making their own rendering pipeline and using unreal to run game logic afterall
No ones rewriting that much but yes, studios do fork the engine and make it their own. If you’re using stock Unreal (or any off the shelf game engine really) you’re doing it wrong. Unless you’re building an engine from scratch, nothing out there is gonna be tailored to your own specific use case, so you’re gonna end up making changes to fit your game.
Only fortnite cash cow is powered by unreal. If you want something different from fortnite write your own.
@@hellomistershifty You can get a sourcecode license for Unity. Mihoyo did that for Genshin Impact for example.
baking the texture depth as part of the texture is really clever. Love learning rendering tricks, thanks.
now we have some BS like nanite or mesh shaders
@@ivansniper5837all a scam to promote TAA relied pipeline of game development and ignoring optimisation all together
There was one guy on the team who was essentially a wizard and did a LOT of optimization for the game. He managed to get it running on Vita, with all of the huge crowds of zombies and everything.
ON THE VITA?? WOW. Where can i learn more about this?
@ Honestly, I’m not sure. I know someone who was working at Bend Studio at the time, and that’s who I heard it from.
This is, to some extent, less infrequent than we expect. Singular talents go a long way in intellectually demanding activities; it's just easier to see in programming, where you often find people who are literally worth 10x the median and sometimes 100x.
@@AROAH I'm sorry, but this is the equivalent of "Source: Trust me bro."
@@Bloo_Void Yeah, I don’t think the guy who told me was supposed to, either. But his name is on the chalkboard in the school, where a bunch of members of staff were invited to write on the board because they didn’t know what to put on it.
Days Gone looks spectacular on PS5 and I remember it looked great even on the PS4 Pro, but that's only because Bend Studio used their expertise to build their own optimization techniques (like the video says), now my question is, why are multi-million dollar companies relying solely on the third party engine they lease/hire instead of building their own optimization techniques? Where do they invest all those years of development if all they do is record the voice lines and do the mo-cap? I mean, I am no developer but I know there is more than simple "modeling" to developing a AAA game.
Great comment.
RE: Now my question is, why are multi-million dollar companies relying solely on the third party engine they lease/hire instead of building their own optimization techniques?
It cost money and there is no market incentive for these studios. As discussed at the end of our dynamic lighting video, games can do exceedingly well using all the stock technologies in unreal because most consumers will just accept them without thinking twice(until the creation on this studio and it's videos).
Epic Games' Fortnite thrives despite utilizing all of UE's excessively mediocre aspects. The aspects relating to both performance and quality such as their auto lods, noisy shaders, stutters, etc.
Programmers are expensive, and finding good programmers is almost impossible.
@@ThreatInteractiveyour answer is basically spot on.
But it’s also funny, because of one specific publisher. Square Enix. Notoriously known for crazy budgets and crazy sales expectations… they still let their studios create new engines.
A lot was spent on, what is now know as, final fantasy 15’s game engine (Luminous). But even funnier is that it basically had to get completely rewritten because the game was originally for the ps3, but issues with dev meant the ps4 was coming out real soon. And so they had to remake and improve it for modern consoles.
And, guess what, their other recent final fantasy game (14 online) also had a propriety engine.
This though did get modified and used for final fantasy 16, which had a lot of people who worked on 14, also work on it. So this makes sense, due to the teams familiarity with the engine.
But yeah, for a publisher hell bent on profits like any other, they’ve splurged on propriety engine (one which hasn’t even been touched with since despite its long development).
Edit: oops. Was wrong about luminous engine. Got used for the FF7 remake and sequel (and probably the rest of the remake), and Forspoken. And while not used for 16, aspects of it like it’s shaders we’re implemented.
@@pian-0g445 huh, I thought FF7 was unreal?
@@pian-0g445 FF7 remakes are in UE4 ¬¬
What I find sad and ironic is that the graphics cards get blamed for not successfully covering up the jittering effects.
some quite good looking games came to light before 2018. A 4090 should effortlessly run taht quality. Stalker 2 (ue5) is suffering, guess they just default every setting in the engine and launched the game. Throne and Liberty I believe most (or all?) of it was made on ue4. The time of day lighting on that game is flawless, really outstanding creation.
I sense major bs in the industry.
@@h3iberg456 *"I sense major bs in the industry."*
_Just now??_
yeah i remember playing this one on 1080p with the high settings using a i7 3770 and gtx1650 super and i was completely blown away with how the graphics looks like while providing a constant 60fps. days gone is a great example of a well optimized game under a messy engine.
I also have a 1650 Super(Ryzen 5 3600) and I just experienced this game a couple months ago(Fantastic experience btw). I was geniunely surprised by how well it ran considering how good it looked. Sucks that optimization is just an afterthought nowdays.
@@AlrafiHaider-nc3nc Glad you enjoyed it dude. such an underrated game tbh. I just don't understand why are companies cheapening on graphic programmers, while the latter can literally make the game work on x2 or even x3 user hardwares. the "AAA game = beefy rig" needs to end or at least settle down a bit.
This technique is based on the Crytek technique from CryEngine, created a years ago.
Crytek also achieved very good looking RayTracing which doesn't need RTX, even before RTX was everywhere.
NVIDIA didn't invent ray tracing, they invested a lot of research into it and created RTX. DXR is a commonly used non-proprietary ray tracing system that's used in a lot of games.
Really, which game is that?
@@agnel47 Quite a few now. The last game that mentioned using DXR RT that I remember off the top of my head would be Far Cry 6.
@@arclitegames thanks
@@arclitegames RTX is just branding on Nvidia's hardware capability, in reality all games are using either. DXR, Vulkan RT, or their own in house non standard method. dont be confused by solutions like RTXGI or RTXDI these are merely pre-package concrete implementations that themselves utilize DXR or Vulkan RT in order to function. the idea of RTX as its own competeing API standard is a misunderstanding from like 6 years ago.
It blows my mind that this game runs on the Unreal 4 engine. It looks so much better than Gears 5 which runs on the same engine.
maybe they updated the unreal 4 in their own way instead of using what epic provides them with unreal 5
@@MGrey-qb5xz A Hat in Time was released in 2017 and uses Unreal Engine 3 (an engine from 2006) and DirectX 9 and it looks and plays great. Clearly the dev preferred shaping the engine themselves and didn't need to use any features from a newer unreal.
@@blisphul8084 same thing, the unreal engineers are paid to pretty much add in new stuff rather then priorities the bugs the devs constantly complain about so just fine tuning your own version works better
@@MGrey-qb5xz Probably Godot is the way forward, given that it is FOSS and gives control to the developers. An engine by game devs for game devs, rather than a company that only has user metrics to go off of.
@@MGrey-qb5xzdidn't Bend Studio contribute their screen space contact shadows system to Unreal Engine?
to this day i remember Days Gone's PC port as one of the most beautiful and incredibly well optimized games. even at the time nothing could compare, it's just straight up performed 30-40% better on my hw than any other game.
As usual, this was pioneered by cryengine.
CryEngine 2 --- the last AAA PC engine. CryEngine 3 should rightly have been named CryEngine Console.
And where's your dear Cry Engine now. huh?
@@wallacesousuke1433 doing well, crytek is hiring for crysis 4
@@doltBmB doing well? So where are the games (and yikes at Crysis 4, who asked for another title for that trash franchise?)? The growing indie/dev community? Influx of new, up-to-date documentation? Do they have an equivalent visual scripting system that allows anyone to create entire games without programming background like Blueprints does?
@@wallacesousuke1433 cryengine pioneered visual scripting before unreal copied it yes, but using it for an entire game is stupid and bad and part of the reason why unreal runs like shit
Really excited for the content you’re putting out man. This is great. Keep it coming!
I love screen space shadows, my favorite graphical effect in modded skyrim, fallout 4 and new vegas.
Community shaders is a great alternative to ENB. It's not at the same level as ENB yet, but ENB is going to crash and burn because Boris Vorontsov is a giant asshole.
@@arclitegames I feel like he has mental issues just like Terry Davis
What mod do you use for screen space shadows in Skyrim? and does ENB have SSS? If so do you prefer community shader shadows or ENB?
Cheers
@@George-um2vcENB has SSS, yes.
@@arclitegames
He isnt an asshole he just is a bit rough from time time but hes doing gods work and thats what matters
I'm a newbie dev (day 3 of doing ue5+blender stuff) and I'm loving all this stuff. I feel like absorbing content like this can guide me to having really solid resume projects. Potentially developing some small game.
Make one about The Order 1886! A PS4 launch title that still looks better than most modern games 10 years later
We sorta touched on that title in our newest video.
Pity the actual game part of the game was a boring slog from how I hear it
@@fearingalma1550 as usual of recent AAA games, especially ones made by Soyny..
i've just binged all your videos and im so glad more people are speaking about this im so sick and tired of horrendous looking games that make me physically sick if i play more than an hour until you fulfill your goal to be able to make your own modified unreal engine i hope that you would make a video teaching beginner ue5 users how to remove all the bs from the engine and make it playable
For the first time in my life, I saw a game where I didn't experience fps drops and stutters when I entered the tunnel. That was Days Gone. Despite being an open world, this game has excellent optimization.
I remember working with cryengine 3, compared to unreal 4 the amount of rendering optimization options it gave was weird for me given my perception of cryengine being "heavy", without sacrificing things like dynamic lighting, specially their newer voxel based dynamic lighting, its 1/5th of performance cost of lumen but looks soo good.
I really appreciate these videos as a counter balance to all the "ohhh, look at the new fancy unreal feature!"
As a solo indie dev using unreal, i would love some form of resource with guidance on some settings to change.
I have already disabled nanite, lumen and virtual shadow maps for a big bump in performance (in a highly realistic game). If there are any other easy and obvious fixes that doesn't require extreme knowledge and custom code (unless its a plugin or an easy toggle) that would be highly appreciated!
Days Gone is still to this day one of the prettiest games ever made!
I don't use contact shadows in unreal engine. Not necessarily because of temporal dependency, but because of subsurface color self shadowing. Leafs normally scatter the light when illuminated from the backside, but screen space shadows turn this lighting off because each leaf casts a shadow on itself.
Exactly. Every rendering trick/technique is a compromise.
You can use stencil to early return those pixels
Subscribed, thanks to you I was able to figure out what the hell was making my games like Rust and Battlefield 2042 look like a grainy mess. In both cases it was TAA, I've since upgraded my computer and really spent some time on the settings to shave off any unnecessary details that kill FPS, induce latency and blur. The current combo of 9800x3d at 5.4ghz and 7900xtx with +8 power adjustment is right at 200 FPS Native with TAA turned OFF or Low when that's not an option. This is at 1440p on a LG Widescreen @ 240hz. Now that the latency is super low and FPS very high without any BS attempting to blur jaggies, I can finally track other quick moving players with ease and that's saying a lot for a 50 year old lifetime gamer.
As much criticisms Sony and PS get (which are usually well deserved), one that they definitely shouldn’t get is their 1st party studios optimization.
They produce games that somehow look next gen while not being next gen (like Horizon 2). And while maybe not at 60fps like the PS5 can, still play at a locked 30 with very clear image.
Granted, they have the unique situation of only having to develop and optimize for one hardware, but it still goes to show how far these machines can be pushed.
And I, like others feel that the current gen hasn’t reached it fully yet. We got some amazing looking ones like Horizon 2’s dlc which is a PS5 only (for good reasons), Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank RA.
But even then, it feels like it can go further.
lovely. i underestimated how good it might look for small details, really nice
I beat Days Gone 100% on Steam Deck, a 15 Watt HANDHELD device. The game runs at a nice 40-45 fps except when entering large settlement camps/cities due to CPU overhead where it drops into 30s, but honestly with FSR scaling on and medium settings the game runs AMAZINGLY even with large hordes on your screen and dozens of zombies and explosions going on. Prettiest game I've run on my deck and a great experience
Aren't you interested in immersion at _all?_ You can't even imagine how much of a game's experience you are missing out on by playing on such a device with such a tiny screen.
@@bricaaron3978not everyone plays for immersion some people just want to have some fun in free time.
@@bricaaron3978 That's kinda not the point man.
@@MarikHavair It was _my_ point. I responded with my own point, as does commonly occur when people interact with each other.
@@bricaaron3978 and I completely agree with your point 😉
Gonna watch all your vids after the star wars one. No bullshit, no wacky garbage to keep 10 year olds entertained. It's perfect
Days Gone is a truly underrated game...If Sony made Days Gone 2 Insated of that not-so-good concord they would; 've been made millions not lost millions...Days Gone is one of my favourite games of all time even the PS4 version can put shame on the many PS5 games
You definitely deserve more subscribers. Great video.
Your content is awesome! Keep up the good work!
This is why I wonder if CD project red really did a good thing switching from a personal graphics engine to something like unreal who doesnt endorse optimization
I dont give a shii about CD P and their garbage "games" anyway
The work youre doing is incredible. Keep making videos, youre getting pushed to recommended pages and stuff. Its working.
Id hoghly recommend trying to do a collab with popular techtubers. You have some heat on you atm, some that are bigger than youd expect might be willing to make a vid with you to catch the hype. Just am idea.
respect for days gone!
Zero, trash game
They used high frequency colors to set a floor that can be easily seen and calculated for further rendering, sharpness,
then added a depth material map to indicate shadows, lighting,
wow!
The game runs like a charm and I never had a single stutter or even gamecrash.
Considering you used footage of Horizon, could you make a case/comparison as to why Horizon on release was badly optimized compared to Death Stranding despite both having been developed on the Decima Engine?
You have an interesting channel, I'll be attentive
Keep up the great work, comment for the algo bump
One game that is a showcase for optimization is Alien Isolation. That game runs flawlessly even on the switch and looks nearly the same as on PC.
thank you for your work
Sony first party is just so good at optimization
>kevin mcallister
The Home Alone guy works in game dev?
can you make a video on 1080p monitors, are they fine with modern gaming where their native resolutions are either 720 or 1080p but upscaled or if they are upsampled from 648p to 1440p?
We have some content lined up, but we definitely need to make a video disseminating the "Your monitor is blurry" response when someone points out Temporal SS/AA issues. Thanks for the suggestion!
Meanwhile, I can't even browse the main menu in Rainbow 6 Siege on my PS4 slim (with SSD upgrade)
Thats ubishit problem, they use AnvilNext 2.0 engine
i just got into graphic programming as interest to optimize ue5 and every fiber in my body wants to give up already. this shit is so unique no wonder computer graphics has its own branch inside computer science
Join our discord! discord.gg/7ZdvFxFTba
And gather anymore graphic programmers interested in solving these problems!
Thanks !
My problem with screen-space effect is the artefact they all share, idk if its because im working a lot with pathtracer and my eye got trained to see real global illumination, shadow, reflection and ambient occlusion. But the fact that all of the effects disappear on the edge of my screen, edge of my character on third person games and worst of them all screen space reflections completely fading when the object goes out of the "screen-space" triggers me so much that i am willing loosing 30 fps enabling ray-tracing rather than seeing those artefacts, I know they are very cheap to render, but i just can't stand them.
Use Planar reflections where ever possible.
Screen space "reflections" aren't even real reflections. With a few exceptions, I've never been O.K. with screen space fakery, and especially not S.S.R. after I had been accustomed to true reflections in PC games going back to Unreal.
Screen-space effects have their place. On grass and distant trees, you can add a lot of detail to an image at basically no cost.
Unreal has this feature for a very long time but they are called contact shadows there.
Bro speaks alien language. I'm just a computer graphics enthusiast. Looks like I gotta go back to the basics. lol
It also doesnt help that he's reading off of some pre-written text and he reads the words a bit halfway sometimes, if only he spoke a bit more clearly
Any explanations of how or where to learn this?
@dotcom4389 google doesn't have the info, feel free to prove otherwise
precomputing depth information into texture is very interesting, is there any mainstream way it's done?
Hi, great work, thank you for that, could you recomend any learnign sources?
I have no idea what youre saying or who you are but i hate how lazy and shit modern games are getting so i 100% support everything you say and do. Theres literslly no reason Onimusha dawn of dreams on the ps2 should look better than some modern "AAA" titles
I'm curious as to what your thoughts on the game bodycam are like?
I just watced the witcher 4 trailer rendered in unreal engine.....the hair has this unreal engine look. Cyberpunk 2077 didn't have these problems
It was also "pre-rendered on unannounced hardware"!
Like what? Now we need special hardware just to pre-render 🤡
Unreal has screen space shadows since the beginings of ue4. It could support pixeldepth better though.
Days gone is a amazing game, i finished this game with NG+ 2x
So, what I'm hearing is the devs put in effort. Gotcha! 😂
Networking bro it's like a Strand mechanic
Huh, I might try out this game on PS4 then.
I bake depth maps in Blender using a fog pass. I am currently working on my own solo developed game and am using unreal. I am very new to unreal so I have a question, can't you import the depth map from your 3D software? I actually won't be doing this because my game isn't realistic but im curious
This is why I bought the game full price.
i can't believe this game and rendering technique was made/implemented into unreal by the same studio as bubsy 3d lol
It used UE? Heh, could have fooled me, it looked very nice and sharp, noticeably better then some PS5 gen games. (Played on PC@high settings, not sure about consoles visuals)
My favourite neighbourhood Russian
Isn't this just contact shadows?
No.
@@GugureSuxyes it is
@@LtdJorge No it's not. It's a material shortcut that makes better use of contact shadows.
Hey you seem to be the right guy to ask this, is it still the fact that small, especially long thin triangles are a big no-no for 3d models? Is there still a similar 2x2 block size problem with them?
Definitely, but it also relates to the distance those triangles are to the view. You can find a nice visualization of how bad thin and small tris are for quads in this video clip: ruclips.net/user/clipUgkxjA3U9QCrDi-10s-W_OKrz0k5mHh7mg3y?si=iWOZLINskuJ-8bvx
Is that different than contact shadows? Both UE4 and UE5 have those.
its sad to see everyone dropping their own engine... is the future just going to be the same across all games?
Honestly just go back to PS2 tricks. Just brute force a trick like textures, lightning. Look at Mirrors Edge from 2008. Yes its all pre-baked, but who cares, it looks amazing.
I mean, Epic has made realistic games, but it was so long ago that they must have forgotten how to do it. Like gears of war for the xbox 360
150 subs and 1 video gaddam
So the main problem is 4k, along with the Xbox SS... Unfortunately, I don't see everyone switching back to 1080p, even with AA. Also, DLSS 1080p->4k upscaling is pretty costly. Not seeing a great solution here. Checkerboarding sucked, as well. If only TVs were 1440p... Also, these games use high-res/high-poly assets which do not look good, greatly diminishing returns.
I'd like to hear your solution for those problems, how do you sell a '4k' experience on slow hardware? With Moore's law slowing, at this rate it'll take another decade just to catch up to 4k.
Checkerboarding _sucked?_ Consoles don't use it anymore?
@@bricaaron3978 I don't know, do they? I thought it was replaced with modern scaling. I'm using DLSS now in Stalker 2 and it doesn't look very good.
@@themodfather9382 I thought everybody loved checkerboarding. I don't use consoles though.
Anyway, if a person loves gaming, he should spend what he needs to spend in order to get a proper experience. It's no different than any hobby. Buy the GPU that delivers your target resolution and framerate. Prices are ridiculous now, but GPUs also last twice as long as they did six years ago.
Look at the cost, not the price. If a GPU is $1000 and you use it for 4 years, that's a _cost_ of $20.80 a month. Anyone in a first-world country can afford $21/mo. as part of a hobby.
Loved it on PS5. Super Stable Peformance, no flickering, so much better than the unstable mess of todays UE5 crap.
IMO unreal engine 4 was better than 5. Unreal engine 3 has same issues as unreal engine 5 today. UE3 was not running well on PC and console. It was hard to make games on it as well. But by 2010 the engine issues were ironed out and UE4 came out as relatively light game engine which run well on most hardware. With UE5 epic is doing the same mistake as UE3. But the only thing is UE4 looked like 90% of UE5.
Batman Arkham Knight was a thing of wizardly D=
You should do a tutorial on how to actually optimize a game you make in Unreal Engine. Your videos are great but to newcomers like me it just flies over my head. Like I understand the words you are saying but my brain cant visualize it or put it into practice.
They should just return to bumpmaps instead of creating each nonsense as a detailed object with detailed not compressed textures, it's pintless, you won't even notice that some nonsense above your head has high polygon real model.
Of course you can make your games look better by working around complex issues with simple solutions.
But the future is simply raytracing, no matter how smart you want to make yourself look.
Devs will move to Raytracing not to make games look better but to reduce the cost of creating a game.
Which is far more important for them than creating a smooth running product that looks great while not running poorly.
It's not in their interest.
It is in their interest that we spend both more money on hardware and on their games.
So optimization only happens extensively when devs want to make a for example competetive title that 90 % of gamers should be able to play at 60 fps or more.
You see exactly that happening in most cases.
However, when that is simply not the case there is hardly a reason to sacrifice any graphics for performance and at the same time spend more time making it look close to the unperformant version.
It's simply pointless.
Noise does not look "better" and it's also dependant on the target hardware. If the quality on 9th gen consoles looks bad, that foundational quality trickles back down to PC gaming.
yeah thats the main issue.
What a stupid comment!
You don't need this rt crap to achieve dynamic GI. Cryengine has its own SVOTI solution which looks excellent and works way better than any other, and they developed it 10 years ago. Lumen is similar, but not even close in terms of performance to SVOTI.
Cryengine also use this Screen Space Shadows technique.
"Nooo its pre baked its not fully dynamic" they say. Who cares. It looks and runs great compared to UE5.
This sounds like a self shadowing bump map (normal map today) that was developed by valve in the early 2000s
No it's not, this uses a high map to calculate shadows on a surface, but it's usually used together with a normal map.
I used this in 2 projects. It's old tec but if it's used correctly it can look very good, I saw it first in a Nvidia tech demo 2004 if I remember correctly.
Isn't this just ambient occlusion? What is the difference.
Great Question.
Most *Screen Space Ambient Occlusion* project *soft* darkness based on scene depth and this causes plausibility issues because in real life, AO is more related to our lighting scenario so in graphic terms it would be more related to *global illumination.* In fact you'll find some terms in graphic community calling AO a poor man's GI. SS-Shadows projects micro or "non-shadow map included info" as shadow like(sharp opposed to soft) detail by using values outside of screen space like *offscreen light information.*
Because Days Gone used material shaders that altered the geometric depth buffer, SSAO will also be affected.
Screen space directional occlusion (SSDO) combines SSAO with global illumination information but we haven't seen too many examples of that method.
And of course it’s a Sony exclusive that had to be optimized unlike the 3rd party drivel out there. This is primarily why I’m for platform exclusives despite them locking out those outside the platform. The closest thing to “optimized” we’re ever going to get.
Unreal used to be a good engine..
So your not ai?
i like ur videos but your comaprison are done to wuick ,i can barely notice it becasue you switch so fast
bump
Sadly, this will for the most part be ignored due to RT shadows existing.
What do you mean!
@@MGrey-qb5xz Well, RT, for the most part, relies heavily on temporal accumulation. Meaning that it's not exactly compatible with a temporally-independent approach to rendering. Unless you use a separate denoiser, I guess. But most devs just rely on the temporal pass.
This can be used in combination. For RT shadows to produce the detail found on these flat textures, it would require expensive overdraw inducing(dense/overly high poly) meshes. You can also exclude objects from RT inclusion to save performance.
Days Gone SS shadows and depth shaders mitigate performance problems by avoiding overdraw in both the main view render and shadow map. If using RT, we are still saving performance in the *main view render.*
coo
Would explain why they had to backdown on the mass of the zombie hords ... wich was like the one and *ONLY* selling point of the game as the story was horrendeous ... it's litterally Forest Gump the video game ... like fr fr. go watch a short cut summary of the story it is 1to1, and there are
way better zombie games out there, especially weird about it was, how our boy here allways plays game chars that have a "sorta Girlfriend" allways out of reach for what ever reasons and wich they are willing to die for wihout ever even getting laid with them ... I don't get it. Weird Patttern Recognition
well, that's not the point at all ¬¬
@@CactousMan I know, that's why I specificly asked the question.
@@CactousMan If the game had better performance, it also could have included the amounts of zombies they shown in the demos
@@JanoschNr1 errr, it still looks and performs much better than most of the other "equivalent" stuff available
@@CactousMan Hahaha, oh wait you're serrious ... BWAHAHAHA!
Interesting technique but I guess this is Vram costly
noup!
"Epic has no experience with realistic games." What about Gears of War?
*They didn't make that game,* Collation did. And they had to make serious engine changes that no versions of the engines includes.
EDIT: Let's get things straighten out, the most realistic GOW game released as of now(GOW 5) was NOT made by Epic. The GOW games produced by Epic look like games and VERY dated in comparison with other studios attempts with the realism (with the same hardware limitations).
It's comedic to even consider Epics GOW titles as "realistic".
@@ThreatInteractive huh? Epic Games developed the original gears trilogy. The coalition were formed after the fact to continue the series starting with the Gears 1 remake
They definitely made *that* game, they made all the games until 2012-2014 since ~2006.
Collition made their first GOW game in 2016
Sure, the Gears franchise got their own art direction of sorts. But skin shaders, materials and environments individually had a realistic approach to them, and certainly looked impressive on the xbox 360 back in the day.
uhhh... what?
Man i hate Minecraft
Sadly this game runs poorly on PC
nope it doesn't
it runs really well on pc, days gone is one of the only games in recent times that looks this good and runs 120+ fps on 1440p max for me. alot of other games ive played that dont look nearly as good struggle to get even 60
@@bp-it3ve The game has problems with constant framerate, it stutters when traveling.
@@patek2385 *"The game has problems with constant framerate, it stutters when traveling."*
1. What is your CPU, GPU, and OS?
2. What resolution were you rendering?
3. What were your settings?
@@bricaaron3978 Ryzen 7 5800 x3d, RX 7900 XT, Win 11, 1440p, High/Ultra.
New games look better still