8 ms·

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unre

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people. Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of some of the new engine tools: https://youtu.be/ib6_c6uliLg https://youtu.be/ib6_c6uliLg This is extremely exciting this is possible on a year old console and not a 3090.

dave_sullivan 5y ago
The HN crowd's interest response has been so deadened by constant dopamine flow that they simply cannot be entertained anymore. "Meh" is the maximum level of emotional response that can be elicited. The invention of literal time travel, the invention of AGI, or the manufacture of a black hole as an energy source would all be met with mehs. Just a bunch of people dead inside. I still come here for the links and the 5% of comments that are insightful and not pedantic.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Are you implying AGI and time travel is at the same level as improved computer graphics?
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    No, it was saying that even a fantastic invention would fail to garner enthusiasm.
- glitcher 5y ago
  I would caution against forming judgement on an entire population based on the loudest minority within them. In my experience there seem to be many more reasonable, restrained, and quiet folk out there. Now if the signal to noise ratio in the comments here is trending towards more noise for you, then by all means the comments are less useful and may not be worth the time at some point. But don't confuse the loud cynical voices as being representative for all of us.
  - pohl 5y ago
    No site will ever be judged by the quality of its lurkers.
- boringg 5y ago
  Your jaded view of HN may or may not be accurate but I think the general HN audience has already built in their expectation that the advancement of computer graphics will continually get better through incremental improvement not to dissimilar from chip development. Is this impressive? Yes & kudos to the people who built this. Is it life changing in any meaningful measure? Not really...it isn't a scientific breakthrough or complete paradigm shift of understanding that will the lens which you view your existence? Probably not. And expectations of this already happening were built into how I see the steady march of technology development. This is an incremental instead of step-function change in expectations and was already a pre-ordained outcome. You can argue that my expectations are to high and maybe this came earlier than expected but this isn't some shock to my system. I suspect that I am not the only one who feels this way. And if you are part of the team and just feel like people don't appreciate you work - that isn't the case. It is very impressive but it isn't a eureka moment of excitement (at least to me). If I misunderstand the significance - please guide me to what I am missing here.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    To me, the missing significance is that nothing is pre-ordained. As entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, we build the future. The future does not build itself. And if you are a trendline oracle, the trajectory has been better looking games that require ever more development effort and ever more hardware. That trend has been extremely stifling to creativity due to the ever increasing financial investments needed. The promises of this new engine are exciting exactly because they break that trend. It runs on existing commodity hardware and achieves much better results than everything released on that hardware so far and with less development effort. Computer graphics are not going to solve anyone’s existential questions, but they are a significant creative tool across many art forms and better tools that require less effort to achieve better results are only a good thing for the creative industry, just like cheap digital cameras and editing software democratized filmmaking.
    - boringg 5y ago
      I don't disagree with you I disagree with the follow-up comment from the previous poster about it being 'meh'. Nothin is pre-ordainer for sure, that said there certainly seem to be fairly clear directions in technology. I think what was missing from my understanding is that this is a much more efficient use of resources for a better engine. Sounds like a leap forward in graphics engine (now developers will be captured on the Unreal Engine - great business model for the company). It still isn't a eureka moment that the other poster was really hoping for. Its very impressive but I am not going to swoon over the achievements. That doesn't make me "dead inside" because I can't get fully amped up for this post and I think that the poster missed how people might view look at this development which is why I added my own comments.
- phreeza 5y ago
  I think people were pretty blown away by the mRNA vaccines for example.
winternett 5y ago
The real excitement will come when it does not require a new $3000 graphics card to run on the home PC I already spent $1500 on... The price of keeping up with every new enhancement on PC is directly linked to each new engine update, but somehow game releases can be "optimized" for gameplay on ~3 year old consoles... Also why I haven't bought any new PC games since GTA5.
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  GPUs are $3000 because of Bitcoin, not Unreal Engine.
- kibibu 5y ago
  The demo runs on consoles.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  This is a console demo, not a PC demo (unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it). It runs on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S which cost 500 USD.
  - wincy 5y ago
    The PS5 is $500 if you can find it, there's been shortages for over a year, the effective price is $900 on Ebay where you can actually get one without waiting.
    - cercatrova 5y ago
      You can get one off r/hardwareswap for MSRP usually and is delivered within a few days
    - theaeolist 5y ago
      This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.
    - satysin 5y ago
      I managed to get two, a digital (€400) and a Blu-ray model (€500) a few weeks ago from Carrefour here in [redacted]. It is a bit of a pain having to monitor stock drops but most online stores have a queue system in place as well as purchase limits to try and make life harder for people that buy up every console they have to just put them on eBay at twice the price. A colleague of my wife managed to get a PS5 in a fnac store a few weeks ago as well. Just went in randomly and asked and they had them in stock. Only a few and they sell out quick so was just luck in that instance but if you put in a little effort you can get one in a week or two (depending on stock allocation of course) without having to pay over the MRSP.
unbanned 5y ago
70 people is rather a lot.
- CraigJPerry 5y ago
  I don’t know, i was kind of blown away by the length of the end credits screen in call of duty. I reckon there were several thousand names listed there. Fwiw this demo is on another level than call of duty. The world feels huge, extremely busy - there’s cars and people everywhere - and so varied.
  - Thaxll 5y ago
    > Fwiw this demo is on another level than call of duty. The world feels huge, extremely busy - there’s cars and people everywhere - and so varied. Indeed, but the truth is it's just a demo, now when you add all the rest that's needed to make a real game you start to have issues that woudn't have with a demo.
- martin_balsam 5y ago
  I remember reading that the end credits of Red Dead Redemption 2 was something like 7000 people
  - tpmx 5y ago
    Red Dead Redemption II (PS4) Credits 7318 people (4132 developers, 3186 thanks) https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/red-dead-redemption-ii/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/red-dead-redemp...
- gutitout 5y ago
  It’s all relative as Einstein once said.
- ehnto 5y ago
  Depends on what they all do I suppose. For a franchise tie in, there were probably a lot of people not doing the actual content production.
leshow 5y ago
Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console. I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has been floating around. And the tech like nanite & lumen. It's not as if you can just "turn it off" and pick up a bunch of performance. It seems like you have to develop your game with these tools in mind. In general I think the new consoles are going to have some trouble, even today games don't render at native 4k, they render much lower then get upsampled, and dynamic resolution is also in place to pick up the slack. The promise of 4k/60fps on a console is kind of smoke and mirrors.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Considering that the exact same demo can run on the Series S (1/3 the rendering power) with barely a visual downgrade shows that we will absolutely be hitting these visuals on Series X/PS5 as 60fps and temporally upscaled 4k. 60fps will no doubt be a major design goal of the engine, so even if their current “wow” demos are targeting 30fps, finished games will look quite close to this and absolutely hit 60fps. I agree that this is a marketing demo, but it’s a playable one and does a lot to answer prior skepticism about UE5. As end consumers, we can feel free to remain skeptical till we see the first fished game, but the aim here is to sell the engine to game devs and they are the skeptics that will need to be won over before any consumers will see finished games.
- shock-value 5y ago
  IMO 4k/60fps as a goal is overrated. 3k upscaled to 4k using a newer generation upscaler is not going to look much worse than native 4k, especially when viewed on a TV at a typical distance from one's couch. And 60fps, while crucial in some genres, is not altogether that important in others (particularly narrative-focused single-player titles, for which Unreal Engine is often used especially among non-major publishers).
  - alickz 5y ago
sebow 5y ago
I dont think neither year old console or a 3090 is any form of "consolation". Also while i agree on principle with you, this is still a movie, and one of a trilogy that defined a significant part of culture i might add, so it's a risky move at best. But yeah, besides facial quality(which i think are vastly underwhelming) the movie looks pretty nice, and the rest doesn't even matter when you consider most of movies/shows today are VFX.I remember seeing the first ever UE5 tech demo years ago(i think it predates ray-tracing if i'm not mistaken) and i was kind of surprised.

dave_sullivan 5y ago

The HN crowd's interest response has been so deadened by constant dopamine flow that they simply cannot be entertained anymore. "Meh" is the maximum level of emotional response that can be elicited. The invention of literal time travel, the invention of AGI, or the manufacture of a black hole as an energy source would all be met with mehs. Just a bunch of people dead inside. I still come here for the links and the 5% of comments that are insightful and not pedantic.

andrepd 5y ago
Are you implying AGI and time travel is at the same level as improved computer graphics?
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  No, it was saying that even a fantastic invention would fail to garner enthusiasm.
glitcher 5y ago
I would caution against forming judgement on an entire population based on the loudest minority within them. In my experience there seem to be many more reasonable, restrained, and quiet folk out there. Now if the signal to noise ratio in the comments here is trending towards more noise for you, then by all means the comments are less useful and may not be worth the time at some point. But don't confuse the loud cynical voices as being representative for all of us.
- pohl 5y ago
  No site will ever be judged by the quality of its lurkers.
boringg 5y ago
Your jaded view of HN may or may not be accurate but I think the general HN audience has already built in their expectation that the advancement of computer graphics will continually get better through incremental improvement not to dissimilar from chip development. Is this impressive? Yes & kudos to the people who built this. Is it life changing in any meaningful measure? Not really...it isn't a scientific breakthrough or complete paradigm shift of understanding that will the lens which you view your existence? Probably not. And expectations of this already happening were built into how I see the steady march of technology development. This is an incremental instead of step-function change in expectations and was already a pre-ordained outcome. You can argue that my expectations are to high and maybe this came earlier than expected but this isn't some shock to my system. I suspect that I am not the only one who feels this way. And if you are part of the team and just feel like people don't appreciate you work - that isn't the case. It is very impressive but it isn't a eureka moment of excitement (at least to me). If I misunderstand the significance - please guide me to what I am missing here.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  To me, the missing significance is that nothing is pre-ordained. As entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, we build the future. The future does not build itself. And if you are a trendline oracle, the trajectory has been better looking games that require ever more development effort and ever more hardware. That trend has been extremely stifling to creativity due to the ever increasing financial investments needed. The promises of this new engine are exciting exactly because they break that trend. It runs on existing commodity hardware and achieves much better results than everything released on that hardware so far and with less development effort. Computer graphics are not going to solve anyone’s existential questions, but they are a significant creative tool across many art forms and better tools that require less effort to achieve better results are only a good thing for the creative industry, just like cheap digital cameras and editing software democratized filmmaking.
  - boringg 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you I disagree with the follow-up comment from the previous poster about it being 'meh'. Nothin is pre-ordainer for sure, that said there certainly seem to be fairly clear directions in technology. I think what was missing from my understanding is that this is a much more efficient use of resources for a better engine. Sounds like a leap forward in graphics engine (now developers will be captured on the Unreal Engine - great business model for the company). It still isn't a eureka moment that the other poster was really hoping for. Its very impressive but I am not going to swoon over the achievements. That doesn't make me "dead inside" because I can't get fully amped up for this post and I think that the poster missed how people might view look at this development which is why I added my own comments.
phreeza 5y ago
I think people were pretty blown away by the mRNA vaccines for example.

winternett 5y ago

The real excitement will come when it does not require a new $3000 graphics card to run on the home PC I already spent $1500 on... The price of keeping up with every new enhancement on PC is directly linked to each new engine update, but somehow game releases can be "optimized" for gameplay on ~3 year old consoles... Also why I haven't bought any new PC games since GTA5.

MillenialMan 5y ago
GPUs are $3000 because of Bitcoin, not Unreal Engine.
kibibu 5y ago
The demo runs on consoles.
cercatrova 5y ago
This is a console demo, not a PC demo (unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it). It runs on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S which cost 500 USD.
- wincy 5y ago
  The PS5 is $500 if you can find it, there's been shortages for over a year, the effective price is $900 on Ebay where you can actually get one without waiting.
  - cercatrova 5y ago
    You can get one off r/hardwareswap for MSRP usually and is delivered within a few days
  - theaeolist 5y ago
    This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.
  - satysin 5y ago
    I managed to get two, a digital (€400) and a Blu-ray model (€500) a few weeks ago from Carrefour here in [redacted]. It is a bit of a pain having to monitor stock drops but most online stores have a queue system in place as well as purchase limits to try and make life harder for people that buy up every console they have to just put them on eBay at twice the price. A colleague of my wife managed to get a PS5 in a fnac store a few weeks ago as well. Just went in randomly and asked and they had them in stock. Only a few and they sell out quick so was just luck in that instance but if you put in a little effort you can get one in a week or two (depending on stock allocation of course) without having to pay over the MRSP.

unbanned 5y ago

70 people is rather a lot.

CraigJPerry 5y ago
I don’t know, i was kind of blown away by the length of the end credits screen in call of duty. I reckon there were several thousand names listed there. Fwiw this demo is on another level than call of duty. The world feels huge, extremely busy - there’s cars and people everywhere - and so varied.
- Thaxll 5y ago
  > Fwiw this demo is on another level than call of duty. The world feels huge, extremely busy - there’s cars and people everywhere - and so varied. Indeed, but the truth is it's just a demo, now when you add all the rest that's needed to make a real game you start to have issues that woudn't have with a demo.
martin_balsam 5y ago
I remember reading that the end credits of Red Dead Redemption 2 was something like 7000 people
- tpmx 5y ago
  Red Dead Redemption II (PS4) Credits 7318 people (4132 developers, 3186 thanks) https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/red-dead-redemption-ii/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/red-dead-redemp...
gutitout 5y ago
It’s all relative as Einstein once said.
ehnto 5y ago
Depends on what they all do I suppose. For a franchise tie in, there were probably a lot of people not doing the actual content production.

leshow 5y ago

Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console. I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has been floating around. And the tech like nanite & lumen. It's not as if you can just "turn it off" and pick up a bunch of performance. It seems like you have to develop your game with these tools in mind. In general I think the new consoles are going to have some trouble, even today games don't render at native 4k, they render much lower then get upsampled, and dynamic resolution is also in place to pick up the slack. The promise of 4k/60fps on a console is kind of smoke and mirrors.

dougmwne 5y ago
Considering that the exact same demo can run on the Series S (1/3 the rendering power) with barely a visual downgrade shows that we will absolutely be hitting these visuals on Series X/PS5 as 60fps and temporally upscaled 4k. 60fps will no doubt be a major design goal of the engine, so even if their current “wow” demos are targeting 30fps, finished games will look quite close to this and absolutely hit 60fps. I agree that this is a marketing demo, but it’s a playable one and does a lot to answer prior skepticism about UE5. As end consumers, we can feel free to remain skeptical till we see the first fished game, but the aim here is to sell the engine to game devs and they are the skeptics that will need to be won over before any consumers will see finished games.
shock-value 5y ago
IMO 4k/60fps as a goal is overrated. 3k upscaled to 4k using a newer generation upscaler is not going to look much worse than native 4k, especially when viewed on a TV at a typical distance from one's couch. And 60fps, while crucial in some genres, is not altogether that important in others (particularly narrative-focused single-player titles, for which Unreal Engine is often used especially among non-major publishers).
- alickz 5y ago

sebow 5y ago

I dont think neither year old console or a 3090 is any form of "consolation". Also while i agree on principle with you, this is still a movie, and one of a trilogy that defined a significant part of culture i might add, so it's a risky move at best. But yeah, besides facial quality(which i think are vastly underwhelming) the movie looks pretty nice, and the rest doesn't even matter when you consider most of movies/shows today are VFX.I remember seeing the first ever UE5 tech demo years ago(i think it predates ray-tracing if i'm not mistaken) and i was kind of surprised.