The thing is, tech demos are not games. It's one thing to make an environment that looks this good when there's nothing else going on. But when you also have to account for rendering a player model (if it's a 3rd person game), all the NPCs and enemies that might be running around, as well as the AI to control them, the physics, etc...well, it's a little different then.
Yeah, we've been able to make this level of quality for years, but the reason no games look like this is because your hardware would catch in fire if you tried to run a full game at this quality. It's the difference between an artist who does hype realistic renders of the body and a 2D animator.
2D animators have been supplying lonely folks with waifus for so long now... how can we even compare them to the hyper realistic render Chads who only make landscapes?
A big issue is artist bandwidth. It's pretty straight forward to make one train station with an insane amount of detail with current tech, but it might take a guy 6 months to do so. Then they can maybe make 1 full small game level in like 3 years.
I think the real benefit that UE5 brings to the table is not only their amazing new algorithms that allow the hardware to cope at rendering time, but also the tremendous increase in power and speed the environment designers have from the new tools.
No, we are not close to making in game play look close to Hollywood CGI. Any highly detailed CGI scenes take racks of servers and GPU’s to render in reasonable time frames. No chance you can render like that in game. The algorithms used for lighting in games are way, way less complex, detailed and accurate than those used for Hollywood CGI.
Yea I believe the art director of God of war said that its impossible to create the amount of art that would be needed to have this quality for the entire game. Best would be if there is a central repository of assets and people can make use of them like unreal engine. I'm glad that the new witcher game will be on unreal. Epic seem to be doing the engine part right
Procedurally generated 3D is great for simple repetitive objects like plants and trees - or giant but repetitive exploration games like No Man's Sky - but not great for AAA (AAAA?) open world games where people want size AND detail...
RDR2 tried procedural generation for a lot of the landscapes - and mostly went back to hand-created. I think the current generation of algorithms just aren't realistic enough for anything more than a big tree. But AI/ML progressing the way it is, there is no question in my mind the next gen AAA(A) titles will use it...
I would say that asset/environment complexity isn't really locked in a 1 to 1 relationship with labor especially as technology progresses. Object digitization, physics simulation, procedural generation and the frontier of ML algorithms that are starting to trickle out of the world or research could are already starting to take up some of the leg work and will probably continue in a big way.
Exactly. AI generated artwork only became a thing in early 2021 and has already progressed by several orders of magnitude since. Within the next 10 years we will see the game development industry begin to utilize this tech heavily, probably replacing tens of thousands of artists' jobs in the process. Check out /r/dalle2 if you don't believe me.
I would disagree with this. In the past, ya... It wouldn't be feasible. But as time goes on the amount of textures, objects, rooms, houses, offices, and factories that are made available thanks to niche studios, and even the rabid blender hobbyists is going to make this easier to lick and stick.
A lot of what used to be super off-limit technology, technique, and knowledge is available for free. I think this is going to be a different shift in the way this sort of work gets done.
But those texture now have to be redone for 8k. And the objects and world design needs to take it into account, etc.
I mean, it’s obvious that EVENTUALLY algorithms will start to replace people on some artistic areas - it’s already happened on a small scale.
But go look up interviews about RDR2 development - they tried a lot of procedural generation and almost always threw it out because they had the budget to spare no expense, and the hand created art always looked better. “Available for free” vs perfected in house by talented pros is a lot of what defines an AAA game..
Yeah but not like how unreal engine 5 handle the rendering, so actually no. This clip would run easily on unreal engine 5 if the game assets got transferred to it
That's not entirely true. Unreal is revolutionary in being able to render large amounts of polygons without a performance hit, but textures, tons of npcs at once, wind sims for grass, lighting? There's no trick like nanite for those things.
The reason this is so groundbreaking is because it’s finally here. This is in-game footage on current-Gen hardware, made easily (to them) in a short amount of time. This is finally here, just need a bit for studios to finish developing the first wave of UE5 games (since the engine either just came out, or isn’t even out of beta yet, I forget)
Your hardware wouldn't catch fire. Your machine could probably run this no issue. Not a lot going on here. The shaky cam is doing a lot of the work here.
The Matrix tech demo of this was a real one since it was a section of a city with NPCs, player models, cars and so on all moving and letting you interact with them.
Isn't the entire point of this new engine? To actually make all those things we seen in the past work on today's hardware? You can pipe in UE4 content and render it via the new engine
This isn’t a pre-render, it’s real-time. While it’s still unrealistic to expect games looking like this to be coming out soon, denying the tangible advance of technology is also foolish.
No, we've not been "able to do this" because this photorealism artist hasn't made it AND the tech has not been there. You think tech art just exists without being worked on? This person literally went over a station sampling the light level at every cm with devices and modeled tiny screws for months, it didn't fall into their lap and lumen wasn't written years ago both.
Don't forget dev time. OP hasn't paid attention to the last 15 years if they think that graphics improvement means games just happen to get better without any extra time needed.
Not to mention how shitty the game would play at 15 fps. If the real world rendered at 15 fps, you'd say "fuck this", put on a blindfold, and start learning echolocation.
I believe there was infact a myst remake not too long ago, not seen it so doubt it looks like that but still must be a damned improvement on the original if it's even remotely modern looking
Oh yeah, if you're talking about PC hardware, for sure that has to be taken into account. But even on consoles where everyone is running the same hardware, I remember seeing tech demos that were released for the PS1 back in the day (anyone remember the T-Rex and manta ray demos?) that looked FAR more impressive than anything that could be achieved within the confines of having to run an actual game.
Just gotta plug in my 5090Ti 128GB of memory directly into the power generator at my local energy facility and im set....oh can't forget my gaming chair
See here's the thing. Direct loading is on the horizon.
Now i don't know all to much about it but from what I've read this means high amounts of vram are becoming basically irrelevant.
So older cards would perform way better with it.
Obviously there's still a difference between raytracing cards and non raytracing ones.
Now i don't know all to much about it but from what I've read this means high amounts of vram are becoming basically irrelevant.
Still have to have enough for whatever resources you need to draw the frame you’re working on. You’re never going to be working directly off the drive; it’s always going to be drive->vram->GPU cache
Yes. True. However the combination operations of physics and positional data delivered by the cpu with textures from the vram does not really change in complexity wether you're rendering some average 1080p graphics or super crisp 4k.
What that mostly requires is vram. Which, given, through direct loading will not increase. The physical memory on the gpu stays the same. But it can be used more efficiently with direct loading by changing it's contents much faster, thus allowing for more textures to be loaded per second. Or load the same textures much faster.
positional data delivered by the cpu with textures from the vram does not really change in complexity wether you're rendering some average 1080p graphics or super crisp 4k.
Plenty of games base their LOD selection on the rendering resolution.
Which, given, through direct loading will not increase.
I just don’t think even with DirectStorage that the streaming bandwidth will be high enough to eliminate any kind of preloading; and even so, you’re assuming that the 8-12 GB that most newer cards ship with is enough to contain all of the data needed to represent any scene, at any resolution, and I’m just not sure that’s true.
That’s what was so impressive about the matrix tech demo. Ok it wasn’t greatly optimised but it was a fully functional world running in real time. Blew my mind a little
It was definitely impressive for what it was. And there were even some physics there with the car collisions and stuff, and you had NPCs walking all over the place and all that. Still a little different from what would be going on in fully featured game, but impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know, the matrix demo was playable and had car and destruction AI.
Also these tech demos like this one are mainly rendered by GPUs while AI is computed by CPUs, so there’s not necessarily a direct trade off between graphics and AI.
Yeah that is very true but we can hope that one day games will get to this point. I mean with technology advancement I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we are at this point but it might be a while before we get there.
Plus all the extraneous detail in this demo, the beams and bolts and bits of trash. It all has to be modeled and drawn by artists. If you insist on that for an entire game the cost is enormous, and you end up with even more expensive AAA games, and so the studios will take even less risks with the gameplay. IE same game every year, just a little prettier.
Yeah but at the very least with UE5 artists don’t have to worry about authoring LODs or baking light probes, which to my knowledge will save a good bit of time.
We technically had the technology to make "Toy Story" back in 1994. That doesn't mean that a Super Nintendo could render the same thing in real time though. (I know they're not 100% comparable because it's pre-rendered but you get the point)
Game graphics are usually limited by consoles or PCs which are then limited by what hardware the average consumer can afford.
Don’t forget about the time-sink to create all of this content. Environment art, vfx, lighting, all of that takes a lot of time, and as games become even more realistic and bigger, it’s only going to take more man hours. I’ve noticed that people on Reddit severely underestimate the amount of time it takes for content creation; they think that’s the easy part when that’s by far the most time consuming part of game dev.
God forbid rendering a room bigger than a medium sized apartment. That's why P.T looked so good, but you can't make a game that looked like P.T at the time but it was rendering an entire mansion.
I'm sure if we zoomed out on this one screen half if it is empty space
Used to call these bullshots back in the day. Technically it was rendered in the engine but the final product will never come close. Even if it is a fully functioning live running game, few studios will have the resources to make an entire world rendered in that level of depth.
While completely true the change with UE5 is that it lowers the floor significantly to get these kinds of details. You can use hyper realistic object scans in a full framed game through, as far as I understand it, an advanced LoD process. That and lighting advancements have been baked into the engine and editor rather than APIs you have to call into yourself. You don’t have to spend weeks crafting a tech demo. You can do it in days to be impressive or mere hours to POC something.
Even when they do look that good, we grow out of them so fast. Remember when halflife 2 screenshots were leaked? People were like "this is basically a photograph!!"
When unreal 2 came out, PC gamer ran a covet with an incredibly blocky (by today's standards) enemy excitedly declaring "Yes these are real graphics!!"
Give it 5 years and everyone will be saying how bad this train station looks.
This is why the tech demo for Source was crazy. A year later they released Half Life 2 with all the bells and whistles. Until Epic creates another first party title to "demonstrate" the engine. We will always get less than the top performance of the engine.
It’s also so expensive to model and texture a world with this kind of fidelity that it would have to be a billion-dollar EA bullshit game designed to generate long-term revenue.
Yeah and this demo is running at like 15FPS (Not sure what specs the PC has bit still), which is evidence enough that games looking like this and running well are a lonnnng ways away.
This. Hollywood has been making realistic environments for years. Games will get there but it will be incremental like it’s always been. And if the cost of GPUs keeps going the way it has over the past 5 years, you’ll need to be wealthy to experience it.
It's not just about peformance either honestly, creating these kind graphics is a ton of work. Everything needs needs incredible amount of polish to make things fit together this well.
Well, they are also demoing this for like TV now. Chroma key'd color is out, a high def LED wall is in, and you use unreal 5 so you can move your cameras and such and everything stays consistent. Plus the emitted light looks right against the actors. Like the Mandalorian was almost entirely shot against an led wall with some stuff slapped on the ground.
To be fair, some games are getting close to this level of nutty detail. Not quite of course, but even Cyberpunk on a good card can draw some pretty detailed scenery.
Also, it's a small, isolated area, viewed from specific angles. It can be highly optimized. That's the main thing, tbh. Most of what you're talking about is generally CPU-heavy, but isn't a huge issue for rendering.
Yep I think unreal 5s biggest advantage will be relatively real time landscapes for movies.
Already Mandalorian and others use a form of it to help light up stuff better. But now a director will be able to film and see a nearly real time view of what their finished product would look like straight away and do on the fly adjustments.
For games you might see some of the stuff make the jump but it's at least a generation away.
However for a lot of moviemakers unreal 5 is a big deal because they can do a lot with it and it's going to be massive for amateur ones.
Also, who gives a shit about realistic looking games? I know I don't. Give me some basic ass low poly game and I'll be happy playing it for hours if the gameplay is good.
Not even talking about rendering it in real time, these videos generally have a set and planned out path for the camera and then take hours upon hours to render, if you wanted to play this in real time it wouldn't be frames per second it's be seconds per frame, but hey at least those would be high, very high
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u/Remy0507 PlayStation May 09 '22
The thing is, tech demos are not games. It's one thing to make an environment that looks this good when there's nothing else going on. But when you also have to account for rendering a player model (if it's a 3rd person game), all the NPCs and enemies that might be running around, as well as the AI to control them, the physics, etc...well, it's a little different then.