Woof @ that image quality. I guess I can understand why developers would want to push on the newest tech features, and it’s not going to be as optimized as possible in the first game that uses it. I just watch this video and I think, for all the Nanite this and Lumen that, at the price of 720p base resolution, this game still does not look as impressive to me as Cyberpunk 2077 or even The Last of Us Part 2.
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I think that’s the first time I’m considering a new gen engine purely non efficient to give me a “new gen effect” and be this demanding.
Thanks Epic Games for creating the showcase of diminishing returns as well as tanking consoles that run cross gen games at 1440p / 60 just fine.
Immortals of Aveum, even if you pass the 720p, just doesn’t look new gen, it’s just a pure technical nightmare and after Remnant II, we kind of see a patern, UE 5 is not optimized for those consoles and in fact, no even for high end PC, because it requires reconstruction techniques.
And the industry is going full steam into this nightmare, great.
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I probably will be fine sticking with XSX, but that also means I will miss out on great exclusives coming for PS5. Then again, I said the same thing last gen and ended up never buying a PS4. If I do end up getting a Pro it’s gonna be very hard to justify getting a (possibly) vastly inferior version of a multiplatform game, as much as I’d want to stick to Xbox for several reasons.
This UE5 thing could become something that happens more often and that might be where we see benefits of a mid gen refresh. Phil/Xbox could have stuck it out with Xbox One last gen, after all it was only three years to go until next gen. Instead they came with One X, sadly not every dev took full advantage of it but it was great to see.
They didn’t have to, but they did, just like getting several Japanese IP that won’t sell like hot cakes but they made the effort anyway. So a mid gen refresh for Series might not sell gangbusters, but it will be highly appreciated by a group of Xboxers. I hope the rumor is true about new hardware in 2025, because that sounds like a mid gen refresh to me. The other rumor was a fully digital X I believe?
I totally agree because in the end the question should be is it worth it? the team behind Immortals threw every buzzword they could in there and also went for 60fps which pushes the current version of the engine on the consoles to the maximum. As you said developers don’t have to use both Lumen and Nanite, one game could benefit greatly from the former while another from the latter plus we shouldn’t forget that the frame-rate target is also very important.
My guess is that at least right now UE5 in it’s current form with all the bells and whistles on (as @KageMaru said) is a “30fps engine”, I am really curious to see what a studio like The Coalition can bring to the table in terms of optimization and what their targets will be in terms of features, resolution and frame-rate.
This also ties into what @Marcheur is saying about console optimization as well, but I think we’ve pretty much seen what this engine will offer this generation with Fortnite (a game with Nanite + Lumen at 60fps, but with average fidelity/detail) and these other games with high detail and fidelity but at 30fps. I think the realistic position is that we don’t be having our cake and eating it too. There needs to be a decision between performance or fidelity, just like with any other engine.
I played through Hivebusters and it ran at high resolution (looked like native 4K to me) at 60fps and the detail was really good. Obviously not as detailed as these 30fps UE5 games and demos, but something I’m more than ok with at 60fps and 4K resolution. Baked lighting with highly detailed Nanite models at 4K @ 60fps is my ideal setup.
It’s in Xbox’s best interest as a 1st party game publisher to ensure that all of their teams have access to a highly optimized engine, they’ve got so many studios working on UE5 that it’s almost scary. I can’t think of any publisher that is that uniformly dependant on a 3rd party engine. If it’s bloated and unoptimized it would really drag XGS down. So I imagine a lot of work being done between MS and Epic.
Back to your point, it will definitely be interesting to see how it pans out between the various titles. I think it’s a given that Hellblade 2 will be 30fps. Honestly the game looks like it’s running at a sub-4K resolution. But the lighting and fidelity is top-tier. I can’t see Gears returning to 30 FPS. I just hope it stays at 4K or incredibly close.
I believe that Blur Studios did the State of Decay 3 teaser and while I think they should just import those same 3D assets into UE5 and use them, that game needs variable time of day so Lumen is needed and they should probably tone down the detail or go with sub-4K to keep that performance up.
Point is, all these games will have their own balancing acts. I just can’t see a high fidelity UE5 game running at 4K and 60 FPS on these current consoles. Even with all the optimizations in the world.
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Part of that is because no other publisher has as many studios, no? By the same notion, is there any other publisher which has as much engine variety across its studios as Microsoft?
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The funny thing is, the studios that Xbox acquired are (mostly) using the same engine family that they were pre acquisition. InXile is the only one that switched (Wasteland 3 was Unity) and it was probably a necessity due to the type of game they are making.
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Haven’t we already seen stuff from coalition running on an Xbox Series X using UE5? I thought their demoes were running on actual hardware, or maybe I remember wrong? And they looked good and ran good as far as I can remember.
MS has lots of experience on that engine over the years and with their internal studios supporting each other, I don’t think that whatever comes out of first party will look anything like Immortals of Aveum resolution wise.
You’re right that every game doesn’t have to use every feature but we’ve seen relatively low resolutions on consoles even when just nanite is used. Not this low mind you, but still lower than some expected. The thing is, if a studio is using UE5, I imagine it’s because they find these features appealing. So there’s a good chance they will use some, if not most, of the new features.
I’m also not sure if this studio could have gotten similar results by dropping lumen. With the focus being on magic, lumen goes a long way towards the lighting these spells would produce. There’s a good chance the game would have looked rather flat without the feature. I wouldn’t be surprised if Avowed also uses Lumen for the same reason.
I don’t think this is being fair to Epic or any other studio using reconstruction. There’s a reason why DF has been emphasizing how native resolutions matter less for years now. Reconstruction has been a standard feature in the pipeline of almost every engine. The focus from studios has also been less on pumping out as many pixels as possible and instead producing prettier pixels and treating/cleaning them up as much as they can.
I’ve said it since the beginning of this gen, these games are only going to get more and more demanding and these studios are going to get more creative on how they keep up with the demands of gamers. Reconstruction techniques is just another tool in the toolbox that’s going to allow developers to do just that. The focus on purely native resolutions doesn’t make much sense anyways when there has been buffers of different resolutions in games for nearly 20 years now.
Oh if you don’t have a PS5, then yeah I definitely recommend getting one and I can see how the Pro becomes appealing at that point.
To be fair, a number of people wanted to act like Microsoft, or Xbox, had no responsibility or involvement over their other publishers like Bethesda when the whole Redfall fiasco unfolded. Not saying you were in this camp, I’m just saying it’s not surprising if people see the various publishers under MS as separate entities.
The studios under Xbox game studios, I guess MGS now, do heavily rely on UE5. However I see less of a concern there with the work Coalition do. Even last gen, we saw Xbox Studios utilizing UE4 in a way that was beyond any other studio not named Epic. Gears 4 was the first AAA UE4 title that ran at 1080p during a time when other games was hitting just 900p on the PS4. Just like then, I have faith that the coalition will basically make their own fork of UE5 that runs surprisingly well on console and is the iteration that is used throughout MGS.
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I think when we do these engine comparisons we need to keep in mind what were asking the engines to do in these games.
We expect lumen and Nanite out of UE5 games but I don’t see similar expectations for RT Global Illumination from games developed in other engines. Metro is probably the only console Game I can think of with RT GI (those folks are wizards lol). If developers can’t hit their performance targets using some of these new methods they should probably fall back to using more traditional methods IMO.
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That’s true. Still, even when we don’t factor in Bethesda, it’s quite a bit. For me it drives home the point that Xbox Series and DX12U optimizations would serve them well and pay off big time. They could justify millions of dollars invested in getting their engineers working on these optimizations that will pay off for many products going forward.
@KageMaru That’s exactly it, I’m sure the Coalition had their own optimized branch and now it could be extended to all of their internal studios.
I also wonder how closely PlayStation is working with Epic when it comes to PS5 Pro design. It would make a lot of sense to get an idea of where real world bottlenecks have popped up through its console deployment over the past few years.
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Really good interview over Immortals. I have to admit that I underestimated how much work the team put into the engine. In one example, they actually got back 3-4ms by rewriting part of the shader pipeline. This is a huge savings when your rendering budget is only 16.67ms.
Also, I didn’t consider the memory requirements when using virtual textures, which is a performance recommendation in Epic’s documentation when using nanite.
Really good read.
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Haven’t watched it yet myself.
Was thinking of that immortals interview and the memory demands of virtual textures in UE5 and wonder if it’s compatible with sampler feedback streaming. For some reason I previously thought only the Series consoles support SFS but it turns out any DX12 ultimate GPU supports the feature. IF it’s compatible, it would be a smart move if MS worked with Epic so this feature is supported out of the box in UE5. Would go a long way to help with the memory limitations on consoles.
It’s just the clip about FSR3 and AFMF from the AMD conference. They do have a pinned comment about hoping to see FSR3 soon on consoles and how 60fps with “proper” resolution is a must have in 2023. Odd thing to say, especially since AMD recommends the base frame rate to be 60fps. Meaning FSR3 may benefit some games to go from 60fps to 120fps but wouldn’t be ideal to go from 30fps to 60fps.
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My uneducated opinion on the underwhelming visuals we see this gen along with engine problems?
Console hardware has been flirting with PC hardware for too long now, it’s become consumed by technology ill adapted for closed hardware & these boxes under our tv’s have now become… cheap little PC’s with weak hardware relative the PC high end.
It means coding to the metal of the target hardware with beautiful results (I’m thinking stuff like Demon Souls Remake on PS5 or Forza Horizon on Series X/S) is a thing of the past. Now we just get PC centric gaming engines like UE5 shoehorned into the console space with disastrous effects.
It’s like comparing Uncharted 2 & 3 on the PS3 (stunning technical achievements) with Far Cry 3 on the PS3 (vomit on screen).
So what used to be half the console experience (games built with PC in mind & ported over to consoles) seems to have become the complete console experience (all games targeting pc & just spat out on consoles with a “let’s hope for the best” attitude from the devs).
That’s just my uneducated (like I said) opinion on this.
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In my opinion, the problem lies with unreal engine. UE4 has problems and now UE5 has its own performance problems. The biggest issue is Epic has gone 2 gens without any critisms and able to sale/hype there product in industry. The kind of critism the industry demonstrate towards other companies in the whole space is not demonstrated towards epic and it’s UE. Epic is just pushing out features without consideration towards performances.
These are tools, it is up to the developer to choose which ones makes sense given their game, platform, and performance targets. Nobody is requiring the use of lumen and/or Nanite, developers are choosing to do so despite the performance requirements.
The OG Xbox was a literally a “cheap little PC” and it was the most advanced system of the 6th gen by far and delivered games that were (tech wise) way ahead of the competition.
Coding to the metal (as much as it can be done nowadays with PC versions also taken into consideration) will come from the 1st party studios/partnerships as it has always been the case.
Also it is too early to come to any meaningful conclusions about the efficiency of any engine or the capabilities of the current gen consoles because so far I’d say that we have conflicting results regarding what these consoles can or can’t do.
On one hand we have devs saying that there won’t be RT on their console versions of their games because of performance issues and on the other hand we have games like Metro Exodus with RTGI (something that before the release of the game it was said to be almost impossible on those consoles) at 60fps and DOOM Eternal with RT at 60fps while both are running at more than decent internal resolutions. It’s too early to say anything concrete because the cross-gen phase considerably delayed the process of optimizing/reworking engines specifically for the current gen hardware.
We all know that the PC gaming side has it fair share of problems with the most demanding AAA games for almost 2 years now, you make it sound like everything is fine and dandy in the PC space but this is far from the truth. The “let’s hope for the best” attitude from some devs are for both PC and console.
UC2 and UC3 were stunning technical achievements at 30fps (with drops). The question is are you willing to go back to 30fps on the console side (as you went from 60fps back to 30fps from the PS2 to PS3)? because in the end concessions have to be made, you can’t have 4K/60fps with all the bells and whistles on a 500e box. 
In other words my uneducated opinion is to wait a bit before going all doom and gloom with the current gen capabilities. I know it is crazy to say this but with the almost 3 years cross-gen phase we are at the start of this generation.
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I’d argue that coding to the metal isn’t going to come from anyone at this point. There are many more layers of abstractions, frameworks, and virtual machines sitting between the developer and the hardware.
I think it’s also an unrealistic ask given the complexities of games being developed today, rising development costs, and number of supported platforms.
I think we’re just looking at polished (often first party) titles versus those that are just shipped out in good enough state.
I remember the time everyone wanted everything ported to Unreal 5.
And now we are complaining?
Its the same with Dx12. This was applauded (because the usual Coding to the Metal™ myths) and now I have read proposals to go back to Dx11.
What does Coding to the Metal™ even mean? For example all commercial games for the C64 were Coded to the Metal™ (there was only Metal™ on this machine), but still games from 1982 look completely different than games from 1992. We only have a different view on this now because there were the midgen upgrade consoles. So instead of baked lighting with UE4 in 4k@30fps like on One X we get full global illumination in 720p@60fps 
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