AlexM

And here is another test where I disable lumen reflections. Sounds like the path tracing theory has some validity. Almost 33% increase in fps

Ok just did a test on my 8 year old 970 desktop. It DOES run with Lumen GI + Lumen Reflections and software path tracing enabled. It's not performant but it totally works. I get about 23 fps with 2 shadow casters and some emissives.

Ok yeah that's not a good comparison because the demo stuff uses nanite. I'm specifically only talking about Lumen. As I said, I've already done some tests and the performance is not far off from UE4 with SS reflections and post GI enabled. So it's running well in the 60+ fps region for me. I think naive is a strong word. Consider the fact that the GI aspect of Lumen is more about taking advantage of a data structure that has only come into use in computer graphics in the last 5-10 years. That data structure (signed distance fields) is known for being able to do very performant spatial lookups. Compare that to the less efficient classical GI and the fact it's often supplemented with lightmaps in UE4 and you can see it's not so clear. The reason that Lumen GI is so exciting to me is not because it's just a new tech that's taking advantage of some new GPU chip. This is an implementation of a lighting algorithm that uses recently discovered, more efficient data structures. Consider the following - By not having lightmaps you have one less paramter variant going into your surface shader so you have less draw call churn due to less shader variants. - By not having lightmaps your memory usage is reduced. SDF's are more memory efficient than lightmaps - You no longer need classical light transmission data such as ambient cubes or spherical harmonics because you have no static lighting. - Reflection captures are also expensive on memory if you use that method for reflections. Path tracing is of course a concern because it can be expensive, it's not clear to me yet if that's only used for reflections or if it's also used for the GI. From my understanding reading the papers the GI component might only have to rely on SDF's. Regardless, screen space reflections are already expensive as it is and there's nothing stopping you from using Lumen for GI and reflection captures for reflections if you want. So ultimately, after more testing and time I'll have a better idea about perf but it's certainly not naive to expect this alternate algorithm will be performant and from my playtests already it appears that at least on a 2000 series card it is indeed performant and within the realm of UE4 performance with similar lighting/reflection features enabled. As for how it scales down, that remains to be seen. Yeah it will be interesting to see because from a technical standpoint it seems there's nothing preventing a 970 from running it. I'm guessing they just mean it won't have acceptable performance on a GPU that old. If I were to guess, the pain point is software path tracing. Assuming I can get it to run at all I'll compare Lumen GI + Lumen reflections vs Lumen GI + reflection captures and see what difference we get. I'll post back with my results once I give it a try!

Yeah running my own tests specifically without nanite so I can get a feel for how Lumen performs. The example project isn't a good test because it has so many other features (nanite being the main one). I didn't write a test runner though, just used perception. Were the people you heard that had issues using the example project? Because if so that's probably not a good test for Lumen specific performance numbers.

So I've been playing with UE5 and I must say Lumen is one of the most exciting things I've seen in a game engine in possibly decades. Such a workflow game-changer. Runs amazing on my mobile 2000 series nvidia card. I'm gonna test it on a 970 this weekend. Truly impressive implementation. It's rare you see stuff like this that takes such an unique/interesting approach to global illumination/reflection. Looks like the day I never have to bake is finally coming!

Totally, I try to remind myself about background processing whenever I hit a wall on something. Sometimes I even remember to follow that advice

It went from about the ages of 16 to 26 before it really began to click so it took a little while haha. I didn't really study as much back then though. Mostly just learning what I need enough to ship games/products. Programming is funny in that one day, suddenly everything just clicked and programming was no longer an issue. It's one of the few skills that the overnight feeling has ever happened for me.

This also applies to me learning how to program as well

I doubt collision is going to change. It's still going to be a bunch of convex primitives attached to the geo. Collision LODing is an interesting idea but we kind of already do it today by broad and narrow phase collision tests. Usually when you do a collision lookup with a raycast you first test against an AABB (a bounding box) and only if that broad phase passes do you attempt to do a convex hull test. Then finally, if you are crazy a third per-poly test. For the sake of argument, if you DID really want to do a per-poly collision test on nanite level ultra-high resolution geo there are data structures that make it relatively fast. They can essentially split the high poly mesh into regions and throw out a bunch of the regions based on where the ray hits. In fact I believe Unity already does this for their per-poly collision tests because one of the build steps is to make a collision representation of a per-poly collision mesh. I'm guessing they did this because so many people kept enabling per-poly collision because they were lazy and didn't understand the implications then wonder why their CPU performance is so bad. With these optimizations, one of the bigger issues becomes needing a lot of memory to store all the structure in a way that can be quickly looked up.

100% agree. Neither Unity or Unreal get this right. Unity at least has probuilder but even to this day hammer is still way better. I sometimes think my feelings are antiquated but I still see frustrated designers to this day that wish they had the ability to prototype quickly without involving an artist.

I hope Bloodborne gets a similar FPS bump, it could certainly use it. I guess I'll find out about the media apps when I get my ps5. Maybe by then they'll all be implemented....... and I'll be in my 40's :X

I put the game down about a year ago when I got stuck and am playing from the start again. This time everything is just working out way faster. I guess my brain has been working on the game subconsciously over the last year haha. I remember getting stuck on O'Rin of the Water and Genichiro for days at a time and managed to beat them on the 3rd or 4th try this time. Hopefully it's the same deal with the Guardian ape. And yeah, this game is vast. They pack so much interesting stuff in the area they have too!

Sekiro, hopefully this time I can beat it. I got stuck on the guardian ape last time.

Honestly, I'm pretty much only buying it so I can play demons souls. Maybe the rachet and clank game too Well that and one of my ps4's has eaten my Tekken disc so I can't play disc games on it anymore ? What media apps are missing?

Sounds potentially vomit inducing Your english is fine

Vanquish. Holy shit this game is good. The control feels so amazing.

Playing a lot of games lately Risk of Rain 2 So fun! Might be my game of 2021. It's been so long since I've played a game so much I'm trying to do every little thing and WISH there was DLC. Hades Fun! Unfortunately it also makes me want to play more risk of rain 2 ? Need to spend more time with this before I can totally form an opinion. Yakuza Like a Dragon This game is great, it's yakuza mixed with dragon quest. They totally changed the combat system to an active turn based system. Refreshing after having the same system for so long. They have classes and job systems. When you get into fights your allies change into their jobs and the enemies turn into monsters. They explain it by saying that the main character is insane and that's what he's seeing. Valheim Just started getting into this but it seems like it's going to be very addictive. Ashen Looks pretty nice. I kind of lost interest after an hour and haven't gone back. Mario 1 I got one of those little Nintendo retro famicom things. I think I'm over the whole nostalgia thing and don't really need to be playing mario anymore. The portable thing is a little too small for my hands too.

Ah that's probably why I didn't follow up. I am not a fan of stealth games from that era especially. That said, too many people have told me how great this series is. Will def try at some point this year.

I think I own both those games but have never tried them.. godammit steam... :X Will add the to the list!

What game is that?

Dedicated servers with persistent worlds? This sounds amazing/dangerous. Bought it and am planning to give it a whirl this weekend. From everything I've heard this sounds like it could be very addictive.

So much Risk of Rain2. Had a 3 hour run last night :X Also started the new Yakuza game. So far so good!

FWIW I feel that way about most games I love. I've been playing fighting games for 25 years and still make stupid mistakes. That said I'm always having fun when I play them..... Well 95% of the time

Hot damn. I could deal with the narrow FOV bug now that you pointed out the eyeball nipples I can no longer unsee o_0

I just realized you're in south california. I'm guessing the bay area is even more expensive with all the programmers? One other thing to note is the pay in Vancouver is relatively quite low, even within Canada. It's gone up a lot for tech people lately though because everyone started leaving. I guess that's the one thing many of us here have as an advantage. We aren't necessarily tied to our location by our jobs. After the pandemic stuff subsides I'm going to have to put more thought into where I want to live in the next 10 years.