We´re looking at ~5 year development cycles for AAA games now and we`ve already seen AA games like Robocop or Remnant do nice things with UE5, so what exactly is your point?
They exist, is that the point? Am I saying that UE5 games don't exist? No.
These games are perfect examples of not really needing UE5. Quick google on their performance and it's full of peoples scratching their head why it's so heavy on hardware for how it looks.
And yet your first 2015 example is "The Order". Please tell me that the irony is not lost on you.
The cost of asset building is not an engine specific issue and lod transitioning and pop in is not reserved to high quality assets nor does a system like Nanite care what you feed it.
Maybe, but once again, that`s not on the Engine, but on the devs to optimize and choose what to go with. It´s not like UE5 forces you to do xy, it`s just a set of tools.
Marketing came back and said it would be nice if our game used that cool UE5 demo at the beginning of the gen to hype gamers. Slap nanite and lumen on your game, we don't care about reasons.
And it suffers from pop in, visible lod transitions and absolutely garbage indirect lighting as all games without any form of real time GI do.
wut? There's been tons of ways to simulate indirect lighting with raster. They look good enough and much much faster. Quantum Break detailed it nicely at SIGGRAPH 2015. Red Dead redemption 2 has indirect lighting, Decima has it since Killzone Shadow fall. Last of Us part 2.
The only reason to have RT GI, be it software like Lumen or hardware accelerated is
1) your artists are fed up with putting lights but you'll throw hardware requirements under the bus
2) heavily dynamic world, destruction and the like ala Fortnite/Satisfactory/Teardown.
If you go with 1) but not really need 2), then devs should slow the fucking Lumen refresh rate to a snail pace. SH2 is using GPU resources for nothing dynamic. Yes that's on devs, or IS IT? This engine is made for Fortnite billions where it needs to refresh constantly. Devs on UE5 forums have ASKED control over lumen refresh events for static scenes and they were ignored.
See above, minus the GI (to a ddegree) as Avatar actually has a decent system, which btw also gets very heavy on higher settings, because RT. Lumen isn`t heavy because it is in UE5 it`s heavy because it uses RT the moment you use it as intended. That`s a cost no engine can circumvent so once again, what`s this got to do with UE5 in particular?
good and cutting edge are not the same and it`s up to the developers what they`re going for.
Games where the dynamic elements all play "who glows the brightest in indirect lighting conditions", and a lot of objects downright look 2d because of very limited AO, look how the RT update changed the look of TW3......
dude., I don`t really get it..... You´ve been around for a while, you should know and be able to see the weaknesses of that era very well.
I get it you`re dissatisfied with the progress vs the hardware cost, but that`s simply the way it is with diminishing returns.
We´re at a point were all meaningful visible progress is ridiculously heavy on the hardware but that is not UE5`s or really any engine`s fault...so I don`t quite understand your fixation on that.
I'm not just impressed by the hardware requirements for what I see. Really not hard to understand. Not a fixation. But I do hold dear some engines outside of UE and HOPE they thrive.
UE5 makes devs shit the bed on optimization most often than not. You're right its not all on the engine fault (fucking stutters though, you can't argue that one
), but that's also what happens when a studio fires the smart guys who were making an inhouse engine.
Then the studio optimizes labour costs by switching to UE so that they can offload labour to another country, lower wages most often than not, since now documentation and knowledge base for that engine is getting massive so it's easy to pour peoples in for a rush in development and then layoff massively. So what that means? A whole lot of junior devs. Now because UE marketing convinced the accountants and marketing department that it's the solution forward, you have a bunch of headless chickens running around pushing plugins in without a fucking clue about optimization. Yay! So it is not connected to the code, the engine per say, but because they sell an ecosystem where you can cheap out on labour, knowledge to make a game, it is still a symptom of studios moving to UE. No doubt about that.
I can't be the only one hoping not everything heads in that direction? UE has convinced so many studios to switch, it's the death of many inhouse engines. I don't like that. I'm not asking for the death of UE as you seem to hint a. But I'm sure as hell not impressed. I can't have that? Diminishing returns? 100%. PLATEAU even. That's disappointing too.
Watch Indiana Jones as the next uproar. Scratch what I said earlier in the thread to Slimysnake. I thought well, ID tech, optimized right? They REQUIRE RT hardware. No raster option. I'm fine with that, I have the hardware for it, but does it LOOK like it needs RT? Will peoples be happy about performances? Absolutely not. I think the game looks good but not even to last gen's peaks.