Features What Unreal Engine 5 means for the games industry...and you.

There were some obvious compromises. The lighting was conspicuously missing lights. There was only the sun for most of it. That suggests more lights have more performance impact. The geometry might have been high detail but it was also seemed like they couldn't have a lot of it - it was really just rocks and a lot of copies of the same statue. If it was that powerful I'd expect a lot more then rocks in the scene and lots of different statues.

As a PC gamer I am waiting for full ray traced games so Lumen not so important, although if they need to use it for consoles that lack the RT grunt then hopefully they'll make it easy to switch to a full RT implementation for more powerful PC's. The geometry thing still need to see how well it works in a real game with a lot more different geometry required but anything that reduces geometry pop is good.

 

...Next generation feature sets having to run at old generation resolutions & frame rates.

1440p 30fps base render with faux, smoke & mirrors 4K upscaling, doesn't exactly match the hype with reality.

 

yea I read the statement about needing to beef up our CPU's, and I thought ... why? its an APU running 1440p 30 FPS in a cooling restrictive box, think I will be ok for a bit

 

It means you'll get a lot of AAA games where the entire budget goes on visuals and the game itself has all the depth of a teaspoon.

...that and/or budgets balloon, production times increase, industry crunch and/or burnout gets worse.


All while players bitch that AAA games have gotten more expensive, less frequent [or more shovelware-y] and more shallow.

 

Not really...

The problem is that you basically have to split graphics into two parts:
The technical one
The art one

And a game that gets the art part right (Ori and the blind Forest, Hollow Knight etc) will always be more appreciated than a game that gets the technical part right (Crysis, Shadow of the Tomb Raider etc).

In an ideal world of course you'd get both right, but that will never happen as creativity is too risky for the management once you get a sufficient budget that allows dabbling in the technical part.

 

RT lighting and direct resource utilisation (not manual LOD generation) both decrease art costs per asset. Because you still create the same high-detail model as before, but cut out the entire process of generating multiple 'game ready' models, and dike out the entire light baking pipeline completely.

 

well to be fair its been like that for a while now, especially on consoles ...

 

Nobody should underestimate how deeply rooted UE is in the movie business by now. Virtual sets running massive LED screens with live backgrounds instead of green screens/stages. That's a large part of what Epic is doing with UE, games are slowly becoming 'a side project', if one wanted to see it that way.