I did some perf eval of nanite foliage, millions foliage on screen, was 88 ms with Nanite, BUT if I disabled wind/WPO (was using pivot painter), and alpha test, it went down to 17ms! Takeaway is: simplify your wind, or use the cull WPO at distance feature And try to avoid alpha test even if it means more polygons to model leaves/grass.
the reason for the fps drop when enabling nanite is that lumen GI is not calculated for non-nanite foliage but when you enable nanite you add the complexity of calculating the lighting for a lot of grass. nanite actually outperformance the non-nanite vegetation when the models are high poly (unlike what you had in your scene) for example in an empty scene with only one instance of a film quality tree asset with around 2.6 million polygons I get around 40 fps but with nanite enabled fps is around 55-60 and I can 1000 instances with same fps.
It is the textures and shadows that consume performance and the distance at which they disappear. You can set size textures to 512x512, The player will not notice the difference. Also the leaves of the trees 512x512. Unless he's a botanist. The ground at 2k, and the tree trunks at 2k. That would be the default version, then you can add the ability for the player to change the textures and distance.
nanite is great but still quite early days , for me making models/assets is great when using nanite not having to bake down to low ect for game use but the foliage still isnt that good yet . I have seen another interesting video trying to use cached shadows with nanite and still having moving trees with static shadows which has a big jump in performance its done in a hacky way but its something that will hopefully make its way into the engine in time , heres he vid if your interested "Unreal Engine 5.1 Preview 2 - A Story about Nanite Foliage w/ Free Plugin"
I think LOD for non-nanite meshes plays a so relevant role that is impossible to get a common rule: depending on how it is set up it does change too much the performance! Personally I experienced that generally small plants can use harder LOD without loosing too much quality, so they perform better in non-nanite, while big plants and trees are better on nanite.
Unfortunately the nanite grass suffers from overdraw pretty bad, ive done a bunch of testing with foliage and nanite from day 1, when everyone was yelling you cant use nanite with foliage. The best method is using 100% mesh no alpha (to avoid masked shader). I did develop a trick to help out when using masked to increase perf.
They must have fixed it because I have a foliage heavy scene without nanite i get 30-40 fps, with nanite on I get 80 to 85 with a few occasional dips into the low 60's
Would be nice if one could make the wind not happen after a certain distance. Then one could have shadows in the far distance but the shadow cashe would not have to update.
An important thing to consider, everything that can be nanite should be nanite as mixing both traditional geometry and nanite will come at an additional cost than just doing entirely traditional geometry in scene. Once they add in nanite landscaping this should definitely improve performance.
@Spider Dev The technology is still new and being improved. There aren't any games released with this tech yet because of this, but there are games currently being developed with it, such as AoC for example. I'm also speaking from my personal experience. Nanite has an upfront cost to consider, which can be a drain when using it in conjunction with non Nanite geometry. The other benefit to using Nanite is having actual geometry for foliage instead of masked opacity. This significantly reduces overdraw, which can be murder on performance.
@@spiderdev5166 Fortnite actually uses nanite with virtual shadow maps and lumen on next gen consoles and pc. Its confirmed in their site to be the first game to be using this type of features, UE5 its still pretty recent and has still lots of issues, so devs probably want to stay safe in UE4.
@@spiderdev5166 ichh man I dont know to be honest, perhaps when UE5's new features start to become stable, so I would say perhaps around version 5.2 or 5.3, or maybe not, maybe theres companies already working on new games on UE5 but they havent yet confirmed it. CD Project Red is also remaking the Witcher games on UE5 as another example. Lumen is still pretty heavy, virtual shadow maps need to cache shadows which is a pain in the ass to do anything creative with foliage because grass,trees,flowers need to move with the wind, making their shadow not able to cache causing a huge performance hit. And for last theres nanite which was advertised as a revolutionary feature (which it is) but we have the bare minimum control over it, nanite works by itself but I would like to make it more aggressive in some cases. We still have huge problems with foliage while working with nanite like showed in this video. So in the upcoming months or year expect new releases or teasers of games made in UE5. Like Ark 1, which is being remastered in UE5.
I can still enable nanite to older foliage, that didn’t seem to have that option before. Does 5.1 somehow convert all the foliage to nanite by itself or am I missing something? Thanks!
Nanite is out of my scope of explanation, but it basically procedurally creates LODs that didn't exist before, so it can have both the original high-res close up LOD, and smaller low-poly far away LODs
Im really sorry, but i'm mitiged with your conclusion, exemple for game : Nanite for grass is not better, why ? first because you will never have that kind of density and you cull your ground foliage, second because in both case large density and even large density, the frame rate is not suitable. For cinematic or Arhi viz, both case are ok 40 fps is ok so no problem it's just a choice.
Personally i thought nanite was great until i started working on a project where nanite foliage started to dissapear in the distance. No matter what i did i couldnt solve the problem.
It's all about the shader, if you were using masked it likes to enlarge the clear tri groups, you can add a distance blend to opacity and adjust to your assets
The so glorified 'nanite' is CRAP! Not only for foliage but with any mesh. The reason is that by just enabling 'nanite', it 'sucks' ~50fps from your project. It's better not to use that crappy technology.
Lol? Absolutely false. Nanite permorms much better than non-nanite meshes and regular LODs in many many cases. I use it everyday for real time Virtual Production Scenes, so I know what I am talkinh about
@@gil6970 yes. It would. You just have to know how to use it. It you use it on trees with animated materiales that world position offset, then you will kill performance. But if you make some tricks, then you will get awesome performance. Many people complain about Nanite performance cuz they don't know what they are doing. They use materials that have the world position offset slot working and also raytracing shadows enabled in the project instead of using virtual shadow maps, which perform really well with Nanite.
I did some perf eval of nanite foliage, millions foliage on screen, was 88 ms with Nanite, BUT if I disabled wind/WPO (was using pivot painter), and alpha test, it went down to 17ms! Takeaway is: simplify your wind, or use the cull WPO at distance feature And try to avoid alpha test even if it means more polygons to model leaves/grass.
thanks for the inside, I'm currently strugling with rendering high quality foliage in UE5, that comment made my day as I was about to give up.
@@micho510900 did you try it? How did that end up?
the reason for the fps drop when enabling nanite is that lumen GI is not calculated for non-nanite foliage but when you enable nanite you add the complexity of calculating the lighting for a lot of grass.
nanite actually outperformance the non-nanite vegetation when the models are high poly (unlike what you had in your scene) for example in an empty scene with only one instance of a film quality tree asset with around 2.6 million polygons I get around 40 fps but with nanite enabled fps is around 55-60 and I can 1000 instances with same fps.
how can i disable the lightning for a lot of grass?
The main benefit of nanite foliage is not preformance, it's that it has "infinite" draw distance as 3d trees / grass, without needing 2d imposters.
so do you think that it will not need any lods as well? i would like to see grass that does not pop in when players are nearby
I too use a magnifying glass while playing games
@@kalwallingford7039 that's kinda the whole point of nanite, not needing any LODs because it simplifies the geometry dynamically.
It is the textures and shadows that consume performance and the distance at which they disappear. You can set size textures to 512x512, The player will not notice the difference.
Also the leaves of the trees 512x512. Unless he's a botanist. The ground at 2k, and the tree trunks at 2k. That would be the default version, then you can add the ability for the player to change the textures and distance.
nanite is great but still quite early days , for me making models/assets is great when using nanite not having to bake down to low ect for game use but the foliage still isnt that good yet . I have seen another interesting video trying to use cached shadows with nanite and still having moving trees with static shadows which has a big jump in performance its done in a hacky way but its something that will hopefully make its way into the engine in time , heres he vid if your interested "Unreal Engine 5.1 Preview 2 - A Story about Nanite Foliage w/ Free Plugin"
It's not hacky. The engine has its some features that are intended to do this
What’s the pc spec you running this on. Just to give us a spec idea.
I think LOD for non-nanite meshes plays a so relevant role that is impossible to get a common rule: depending on how it is set up it does change too much the performance!
Personally I experienced that generally small plants can use harder LOD without loosing too much quality, so they perform better in non-nanite, while big plants and trees are better on nanite.
Unfortunately the nanite grass suffers from overdraw pretty bad, ive done a bunch of testing with foliage and nanite from day 1, when everyone was yelling you cant use nanite with foliage. The best method is using 100% mesh no alpha (to avoid masked shader). I did develop a trick to help out when using masked to increase perf.
They must have fixed it because I have a foliage heavy scene without nanite i get 30-40 fps, with nanite on I get 80 to 85 with a few occasional dips into the low 60's
so what i see , using non nanite foliage with a nice cull setting better. Or did i miss something ?
Would be nice if one could make the wind not happen after a certain distance. Then one could have shadows in the far distance but the shadow cashe would not have to update.
Hey i cant see my virtual shadow maps in debug mode, when i click on cached pages i see only black, why?
11:55 lol real trees don't oscillate THAT hard, it's barely observable if you look up, rarely that is.
good call.
Are your foliage materials opaque? Grass appears to be, but what about the leaves? Thanks!
what about nanite create lods for us and then we go the traditional route of using lods wouldn't it be better.
some of my meshes become flat gray mesh after applying nanite to them. is it just because they're unsuported? mainly just trees etc
interesting, thanks
An important thing to consider, everything that can be nanite should be nanite as mixing both traditional geometry and nanite will come at an additional cost than just doing entirely traditional geometry in scene.
Once they add in nanite landscaping this should definitely improve performance.
I do not believe in any of this, why there are no games using it?
Maybe because it is not production ready? What do you think?
@Spider Dev The technology is still new and being improved. There aren't any games released with this tech yet because of this, but there are games currently being developed with it, such as AoC for example.
I'm also speaking from my personal experience.
Nanite has an upfront cost to consider, which can be a drain when using it in conjunction with non Nanite geometry.
The other benefit to using Nanite is having actual geometry for foliage instead of masked opacity. This significantly reduces overdraw, which can be murder on performance.
@@spiderdev5166 Fortnite actually uses nanite with virtual shadow maps and lumen on next gen consoles and pc. Its confirmed in their site to be the first game to be using this type of features, UE5 its still pretty recent and has still lots of issues, so devs probably want to stay safe in UE4.
@@TheBlackGamerPT How long until we start seeing games using UE5 as a standard?
@@spiderdev5166 ichh man I dont know to be honest, perhaps when UE5's new features start to become stable, so I would say perhaps around version 5.2 or 5.3, or maybe not, maybe theres companies already working on new games on UE5 but they havent yet confirmed it. CD Project Red is also remaking the Witcher games on UE5 as another example.
Lumen is still pretty heavy, virtual shadow maps need to cache shadows which is a pain in the ass to do anything creative with foliage because grass,trees,flowers need to move with the wind, making their shadow not able to cache causing a huge performance hit. And for last theres nanite which was advertised as a revolutionary feature (which it is) but we have the bare minimum control over it, nanite works by itself but I would like to make it more aggressive in some cases. We still have huge problems with foliage while working with nanite like showed in this video.
So in the upcoming months or year expect new releases or teasers of games made in UE5. Like Ark 1, which is being remastered in UE5.
If you have problems with Foliage and Nanite going “crazy in the Z axis” i explain how to fix it with ease.
ruclips.net/video/wVMImHI24QI/видео.html
Do you know they already fix shadow nanite foliage performance?
Does the grass from the 1st scene have LODs? If not, that could explain why nanite makes more fps with more distant grass
Nanite causes my laptop to crash.
I can still enable nanite to older foliage, that didn’t seem to have that option before. Does 5.1 somehow convert all the foliage to nanite by itself or am I missing something? Thanks!
Nanite is out of my scope of explanation, but it basically procedurally creates LODs that didn't exist before, so it can have both the original high-res close up LOD, and smaller low-poly far away LODs
Maybe it's because it supports masked now.
@Kristopher Snow yes and no..
Game mode shortcut plz
G
Im really sorry, but i'm mitiged with your conclusion, exemple for game : Nanite for grass is not better, why ? first because you will never have that kind of density and you cull your ground foliage, second because in both case large density and even large density, the frame rate is not suitable. For cinematic or Arhi viz, both case are ok 40 fps is ok so no problem it's just a choice.
So in resume, nanite folliage will be good for flight simulator but for close scene there's not such difference....
It tanked my fps when I enabled Nanite on my foliage
fantastic ... awesome...
hello! I used Landscape material openland, but i can't see layer in landscape mode -> paint, pls help me!
Short answer, no it does not.
But nanite distance? Its better overall..
Personally i thought nanite was great until i started working on a project where nanite foliage started to dissapear in the distance. No matter what i did i couldnt solve the problem.
It's all about the shader, if you were using masked it likes to enlarge the clear tri groups, you can add a distance blend to opacity and adjust to your assets
I feel like 1xxx card series owners need to stop being allowed to review bomb unreal5 and newer games in general.
84 fps max in a screen, good luck creating a game using that aproach.
You should be doing these tests in Standalone mode or a full build rather than the editor. It takes away quite a bit of performance as well.
So it sucks still...
The so glorified 'nanite' is CRAP! Not only for foliage but with any mesh.
The reason is that by just enabling 'nanite', it 'sucks' ~50fps from your project. It's better not to use that crappy technology.
Lol? Absolutely false.
Nanite permorms much better than non-nanite meshes and regular LODs in many many cases. I use it everyday for real time Virtual Production Scenes, so I know what I am talkinh about
@@saimon1987 what about using it for games? Would it work well for games also?
@@gil6970Nop, as it requires fast ssd.
@@gil6970 yes. It would. You just have to know how to use it. It you use it on trees with animated materiales that world position offset, then you will kill performance. But if you make some tricks, then you will get awesome performance.
Many people complain about Nanite performance cuz they don't know what they are doing. They use materials that have the world position offset slot working and also raytracing shadows enabled in the project instead of using virtual shadow maps, which perform really well with Nanite.
Bs
I really liked this video! Is it possible to reach you by email or to send you a DM somewhere? :)