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[Buggy Loop]

They used nanite for foliage but not for everything. Unless you want to tell me flags are foliage?

Remnant 2 also uses nanite for foliage:

Analysis - Game Dev - Remnant 2 is the first game using UE5’s Nanite to eliminate geometry pop-ins

Remnant 2 releases later today and it will be the second game powered by Unreal Engine 5 (the first one was Layers of Fear). And, surprisingly enough, it’s also the first game that is using UE5’s Nanite in order to eliminate distant geometry/object pop-ins. Below you can find a video in which...

www.neogaf.com

And Satisfactory:



Video specifically sharing that they use nanite for foliage in 5.1:



It's been entirely possible since 5.1, it just wasn't plug and play and required assets to be reworked in order to accommodate for it.

Are we looking at the same videos?

They do not use for foliage, they modeled certain massive trees with nanite, but not foliage. Again, if you have a giant tree not moving, no leaves in vincinity to model moving, etc. Sure, possible. But, soon as they enable triangles to showcase nanite cliffs, the trees and foliage of that scene is not shown, because almost nothing is compatible with it.

Even timestamped that it didn't work for their foliage.

Or that very video you linked, timestamped

it's already a feature in 5.1 but it's also not applicable for us because we would need to redo our foliage and it would take a lot of time that we don't want to invest in something where we don't think we get a lot of gain from it um so we're probably not going to do nanite on foliage and we're probably not going to use those tools in 5.2 for foliage generation either

For Remnants 2, that source is sketchy as fuck to begin with with talking about maybe geometry nanite, but let's say we give it nanite foliage for another example of games using it. When devs do not care about performances, why the hell not.

But GHG , do you think that's compatible with STALKER 2 in your face realism trees with all this information we have? Or worth the additional performance hit when peoples are already dogpiling on it for optimization?

Why jump on Mister Wolf for saying that there's a nice showcase of nanite? Most UE5 games that used nanite did not have nanite foliage, including arguably the best looking UE5 game, Black Myth Wukong.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Poor shadow quality at times. The flashlight does not cast shadows and often times, NPCs standing in front of light sources don't have shadows either

How is it possible when the first game didn't have any problem doing that? Plus the stencil shadows on that game looked amazing.

We have to go back to simpler graphics, UE sucks.

 

[LordOcidax]

Those low resolutions are out of control.

The only thing that matters here is output resolution “4K”and “8K” for everyone…

 

[SunnySideGuy]

Just got home but did they give any optimized settings to go with for pc?

 

[Neo_game]

Surprised to know this runs at 1440P on SX on high settings. That is not bad considering that 7600XT on epic settings with 13900K also runs at 30fps

Stalker 2 PC performance testing and settings analysis — another demanding game that uses frame generation and upscaling as a crutch

Unreal Engine 5 powers the latest installment, with steep system requirements.

www.tomshardware.com

PC on Epic Settings

• Poor shadow quality at times. The flashlight does not cast shadows and often times, NPCs standing in front of light sources don't have shadows either
• Typical Lumen issues with light leakage and inconsistencies such as it disappearing in and out of existence
• Reflections seem to be screen spaced and foliage isn't reflected

PC vs consoles

• Compared to PC, shadows on consoles are worse, reflections and translucency are worse as well

Xbox consoles

• Dynamic resolution is likely in place, but TSR artifacts make pixel counting difficult
• Series X in Performance Mode is 864p to 1152p reconstructs up to 4K, but looks nothing like 4K
• Series X in Quality Mode is 1440p and looks great, but is 30fps
• Series X in Performance Mode never hits 60fps when it matters. Otherwise, always is in the 40s and 50s during gameplay. Shouldn't be used without a VRR display
• Series X in Quality Mode and Series S run fine at 30fps, much better than Performance Mode on Series X. Minor frame time spikes and drops. Traversal and combat are locked. Still get major freezes when entering towns with many NPCs
• No motion blur at 30fps

So the lighting and shadows seems to be broken in this game. No wonder I was shocked when I saw a preview video and the game just looked flat with a flashlight. Usually I love dark, atmospheric games with good lighting. They should give up on 60fps if it is CPU bound. But since it can run around 40-50fps. They should be able to make the game in 40fps around 1080P.

 

[Little Chicken]

@DenchDeckard attempting to respond for comment:

Are you enjoying the game?

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

 

[GHG]

Are we looking at the same videos?

They do not use for foliage, they modeled certain massive trees with nanite, but not foliage. Again, if you have a giant tree not moving, no leaves in vincinity to model moving, etc. Sure, possible. But, soon as they enable triangles to showcase nanite cliffs, the trees and foliage of that scene is not shown, because almost nothing is compatible with it.

Even timestamped that it didn't work for their foliage.

Or that very video you linked, timestamped

Nice selective screenshot, but you can clearly see they are using it on the large trees (inclusive of the leaves) in the first video. It's not up for dispute.

For Remnants 2, that source is sketchy as fuck to begin with with talking about maybe geometry nanite, but let's say we give it nanite foliage for another example of games using it. When devs do not care about performances, why the hell not.

This has gone from "it got introduced in 5.3" (wrong), to "no games use it anyway" (wrong again), to now attempting to disqualify any games that do use it. What next, an outright dismissal of Fortnite where they use if across the entirety of the game?

But GHG , do you think that's compatible with STALKER 2 in your face realism trees with all this information we have? Or worth the additional performance hit when peoples are already dogpiling on it for optimization?

There is no reason why they couldn't have used it, all the documentation and guides are readily available from epic, but when it comes to foliage and trees you need to build with it in mind from the start when creating your assets (or it requires any pre-existing assets to be reworked which they may not have had time for given their predicament). Here are some considerations:

For Fortnite’s content, we found it was usually faster to avoid masked materials and instead rely on increasing triangle counts of the mesh and keeping the materials opaque, especially for trees and grass. This is mainly because masked materials in Nanite incur a significant cost during base pass shading, since we have to recalculate triangle barycentrics per pixel, and negative space in the alpha maps adds additional overdraw cost.

After converting Fortnite trees to Nanite, we noticed they would lose their canopies in the distance due to the simplification process; either the leaves would thin out, or in some cases, abruptly go bare. At some point, each individual leaf could not simplify any further than a single triangle and leaves needed to be removed to reduce triangle count. Removing leaves like this causes the canopy to visually thin out.

To correct that, we added new logic to the Nanite builder (an option called “Preserve Area” that can be enabled under mesh “Nanite Settings”) that redistributes the lost area to the remaining triangles by dilating out the open boundary edges. In the case of leaves, this is the same as the remaining leaves getting bigger. While that looks odd if performed up close, at the distance when area preservation activates, it instead appears to maintain the density that should be there.

More here:

Bringing Nanite to Fortnite Battle Royale in Chapter 4

Dive into the Nanite Programmable Rasterizer in Unreal Engine 5.1 and take a look at how it’s elevating the graphics in ‘Fortnite Battle Royale’ Chapter 4.

www.unrealengine.com

The Nightingale devs have also spoken about the considerations and conversion process for Nanite here:

Converting our project to Nanite took longer as we also wanted to take advantage of Virtual Shadow Maps. With Unreal Engine 5 supporting interoperability of Nanite and non-Nanite assets we were able to handle the conversion gradually, which enabled us to have a fully playable experience as we transitioned. That being said, you can expect to see improved performance with Virtual Shadow Maps as more assets get converted to use Nanite, so there’s some incentive to work through this conversion to understand how your game will perform.

The conversion process for an individual asset tended to fall in one of these categories:

• Some assets were already high enough fidelity and we simply enabled Nanite on the mesh.
• Some assets would benefit from being reauthored at higher fidelity, so we rebuilt these with Nanite in mind.
• Our player-built structures had a custom shader to render with transparency as the player is placing a structure. Since Nanite is only supported with opaque objects, we implemented a system where we would fall back to a non-Nanite mesh with transparency when the mesh was in this special placement mode.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/taking-the-leap-on-nightingale-how-inflexion-games-upgraded-from-ue4-to-ue5-mid-development

That's another game that uses nanite for trees and foliage btw if you want to give it a go.

Why jump on Mister Wolf for saying that there's a nice showcase of nanite? Most UE5 games that used nanite did not have nanite foliage, including arguably the best looking UE5 game, Black Myth Wukong.

This is a game dominated by foliage and trees across the gameworld. I don't see how you can say it's a "showcase" for something when it's not applied to elements which are the most prevalent across the game world. Combine that with the performance issues, and I don't see why anyone would be comfortable calling this a "showcase" when they've clearly needed to make huge cuts and compromises in order to get this shipped.

And for what it's worth, no, black myth is not the best looking UE5 game, not in a world where Hellblade 2 exists.

 

[killatopak]

Hmmm.. I think I’ll hold off on my Stalker itch. I’m sure there’ll be bug fixes coming along with some performance enhancements. If not, I’m sure the community can whip something up just like they did with the other games.

In the meantime I’ll just continue to play Zero Sievert for that itch. Just got a full release a few weeks ago coming out of early access.

 

[POKEYCLYDE]

I'm having fun playing it, 5 hours in. Get frustrated fighting certain enemies (invisible bullet sponge mutant guys). But the exploration is great. Running smoothly on Xbox Series X, the only visually meh thing has been sunrise/sundown sunlight coming through windows. That looks a little jank, but it's not a big deal.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Even satisfactory dev says they are NOT using nanite foliage ffs. You can’t make this up. You can model a tree in geometry like modelling any geometry and it might work, static tree, no leaves moving because the tree is so big that there’s no players anywhere near or just that your game fidelity for that model was just deemed enough.

It is still not using nanite foliage.

 

[Mister Wolf]

I don't understand why UE5 games that use Lumen won't grant access to Hardware Lumen on PC. I hope Avowed doesn't do that as well.

 

[SlimySnake]

I don't understand why UE5 games that use Lumen won't grant access to Hardware Lumen on PC. I hope Avowed doesn't do that as well.

hardware lumen hits the CPU hard. This game already struggles with CPU usage. it would completely tank the framerate if they enabled it. I mean they already go down to 0 lol

 

[Mister Wolf]

hardware lumen hits the CPU hard. This game already struggles with CPU usage. it would completely tank the framerate if they enabled it. I mean they already go down to 0 lol

It still would future proof us though. That's what PC settings should be about. They should have included Hardware Lumen and better Shadows with warning signage in the settings menu.

 

[SlimySnake]

It still would future proof us though. That's what PC settings should be about. They should have included Hardware Lumen and better Shadows with warning signage in the settings menu.

thats not a bad idea. Or just make it a hidden setting like unobtanium in avatar.

whats crazy to me is that alex was able to build a Matrix city awakens executable using the latest UE5.4 version and he saw insane gains on the CPU. If alex can do it, why cant these devs?

 

[Skifi28]

40fps on a 7800 3d? See you in couple of years once it's fixed.

 

[mrMUR_96]

Lack of shadows from flashlight and gunfire is very disappointing tbh

 

[Physiognomonics]

Still no direct comparison against any GPU to see how XSX does against it I guess? Odd.

 

[Ulysses 31]

How is it possible when the first game didn't have any problem doing that? Plus the stencil shadows on that game looked amazing.

We have to go back to simpler graphics, UE sucks.

muzzle flashes don't light up the environment either.

 

[Lootlord]

muzzle flashes don't light up the environment either.

 

[Lysandros]

Still no direct comparison against any GPU to see how XSX does against it I guess? Odd.

They wouldn't dare to compare XSX to a measly RTX 2070S, that would be beneath Microsoft's mighty powerful system and a disgrace. This sort of treatment is reserved for the likes of PS5.

 

[Dr.Morris79]

I tried it on the Series X last night, Jesus wept..

That was hard going.

 

[Bojji]

They wouldn't dare to compare XSX to a measly RTX 2070S, that would be beneath Microsoft's mighty powerful system and a disgrace. This sort of treatment is reserved for the likes of PS5.

They did that:

Stalker has dynamic res so it's not as easy to compare 1:1.

 

[twilo99]

Something is very wrong both PS5 and Xbox Series X CPU performance when it comes to 3rd party games. It performance worse than 3600, which is equivalent to both Console CPU.

The CPU is outdated and weak, other than that there is nothing wrong with it.

Really if you think about a CPU like that shouldn’t be used in a machine that is build for the sole purpose of running video games.

 

[Bojji]

The CPU is outdated and weak, other than that there is nothing wrong with it.

Really if you think about a CPU like that shouldn’t be used in a machine that is build for the sole purpose of running video games.

CPUs were "ok" for 2020.

Biggest problem is with UE5, game is not rendering any crazy stuff when it comes to CPU and yet it's one of the most CPU limited games right now. UE5 have terrible CPU utilization, some of that was fixed in 5.4 version but almost all games we see are form earlier builds.

 

[violence]

My game doesn’t see the controller anymore

 

[scydrex]

Can it run stalker 2?