Unreal Engine 5 – Ray Tracing Supercharged!
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What a time to be in a simulation!
I thought we already had that
The video states that Unreal Engine 5 has real-time path tracing, which is a type of ray tracing this means that UE 5 can now render scenes with realistic lighting and reflections in real time, which was previously only possible with offline rendering.
You’re probably confusing it with rtx? It’s not the same thing.
the title is confusing. we’ve had real time ray tracing but it’s not quite the same as real time path tracing, which is what UE5 is now doing. ray tracing uses a single ray bounce to compute it’s light paths. path tracing simulates the full path of light by using multiple ray bounces, making it much more accurate for light simulation. so for ray tracing, the light casts a ray that then bounces off a surface one time and then into the “camera” which is what is displayed to us. with path tracing, the light ray bounces around multiple times before going into the “camera”.
what we’ve seen in pre-rendered CGI for years that looks photo real is full path tracing, only recently have we started to be able to compute it in real time, although still with some caveats and draw backs. we’re not quite to the point of having real time path tracing on the level of something like the Transformers or Avengers movies.
Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 have have full path tracing aside from standard ray tracing. I believe the default config is 1 ray per pixel with 2 bounces per ray.
If the confusion is with Unreal specifically, I believe what we had before was hardware-accelerated Lumen specifically, which operates differently from path tracing which people have described in the comments. I was confused too, but I think this is the answer! Someone please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong
Thanks dude, a great video again! UE is massive!
If I’m understanding correctly, this UE + real-time ray tracing is a UE fork from Nvidia, not actually built into the core UE, is that right? So I would have to download and run the Nvidia UE fork to get this feature?
Do you know what else is massive? LOOOOOOW TAPER FAAADE
3s in and you can see the smearing trailing in the reflection of the ball of light
Yup…. That’s the main trade off of these “real time” ray tracing implementations. Current hardware isn’t capable of doing real time ray tracing without relying on multiple frames for denoising so everything looks great in still screenshots, but not in motion. But devs don’t care cause the marketing screenshots look great and most people don’t notice the motion flaws during gameplay.
“I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding”
@@Phoen1x883really 1 dimensional way of looking at things but i can tell you most gaming enthusiasts prioritize quality gameplay over 8k real-time raytracing ultra quality games that are pretty but boring
Cyberpunk 2077 has had path tracing for a while now, and it’s a big step over standard RTX. The only catch is how expensive it is. To get above 60 fps, I’m forced to use DLSS performance mode in 4K with a 4090, but as said, it looks insanely good. If I remember correctly, Alan Wake 2 and a few more games also have path tracing, so it’s not something new, but I’m glad to see UE5 implementing this tech.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle also looks amazing with Full PT and I get 70-90fps with a 4070 Super in 1440p with DLSS Balanced
Here are the games with PT, though there still is some varying degree between them:
Cyberpunk, black myth wukong, Alan wake 2 (though mixed with baked lighting), Star wars outlaws uses RTXDI and the latest one is Indiana Jones. Then there are the rtx remix titles like portal rtx, quake rtx etc.
@@RSpracticalshootingYeah it’s really impressive. On a 4090 I would even call it quite playable in 4K with DLAA, since the frame times are so consistent that even frame rates in the ballpark of 45 to 60 fps feel surprisingly smooth when using a VRR display. Actually I played most of the Vatican level with DLAA, since it’s pretty heavy on the CPU and going down to DLSS quality mode didn’t provide a significant performance uplift thanks to my Ryzen 9 5900X not being the fastest anymore.
@@NeovanGoth yeah with games such as great circle, i don’t feel the need for 100+ fps to have an enjoyable experience.
Meanwhile, my heavily modded skyrim still struggles to stabilize at 40 fps with a 4070 super
Isn’t there a controversy with UE5 where their lighting and rendering engine is horribly inefficient and its simply painted over by TAA smoothing?
yes even marvel rivals is way smoother with TAA rather than the dlss bs
That’s what I have heard.
Yes. Unfortunately Karoly is always bullish on papers and he rarely goes over the cons. And when he does it, he always talks about them as if they were nothing. Truth is, actual high quality path tracing in real time won’t be a thing for many many years, and current solutions are poor.
The tech that Unreal uses is catered towards optimising a specific AAA workflow, and for that world it’s actually very efficient, legitimately best in class.
These studios outsource almost all of their asset creation to 3rd world sweatshops that are constantly competing to drive down costs- and so, assets are typically pretty rough. Similarly, there’s a big thrust to use scanned assets (Quixel) as they’re very cheap and modular. Nanite enables you to use these poorly optimized meshes without fear. So, it enables level artists to be less technically minded, and thus be faster/cheaper. This comes with some upfront performance costs, but is worth it for the savings.
If you have Nanite, you have virtual shadow maps, and if you have those, you can use Lumen. Now you have a reasonably good real-time ray tracing solution that again, eases artist workflows as they can be less technically proficient and still output reasonably good looking and performant scenes.
TAA swoops in here to cover for Lumen’s failings, and DLSS covers for the overall performance problems that this system causes. This entire suite is a patchwork of solutions to problems that the games industry has created for itself by prioritizing ever-growing profits over quality.
Your average indie/hobby developer is not using this workflow, and so, these tools aren’t suitable, and can actually make their games look & run worse. This seems obvious, and it is now, but Epic wasn’t up front about this stuff in their marketing- they advertise it all as universally useful, when really, it’s not. That’s the controversy.
That’s what morons on reddit with no technical knowledge say, yes.
“Real time” but with a delay, as usual?
Did you know that rendering has delay :D? That’s literally how it works
@@ZedDevStuffdid you know that “real time” doesn’t mean “instantly” ?
i was doing ray tracing in the early 90’s on a 486DX2 66Mhz 4mb ram, yes that’s a whole 66Mhz. look at you with your 5 minute frame generation, how fancy,try half a day for a 320×200 image 🙂
Good old days 😊
I started with ray-tracing in the late eighties on an 8 Mhz Amiga 2000, you had to be really patient, but it was magic back then. Insane how much faster it can be done on a GPU now.
And that back then was indeed merely ray tracing, as opposed to this here being PATH tracing, i.e. including global illumination, which was even MORE expensive back in the days (a.k.a. Radiosity)
@@VectrexForever I was doing rtx back in 1627 with some wood and a rock, took me 350 years just to get the first image!!
Real time ray tracing + TAA so everything is blurrier than a PS3 whilst on a +2000$ PC. What a time to be alive indeed!!
What a time to be a Nvidia CEO!
this is too accurate 🤣it’s not the age of raytracing, it’s the age of blur.
@@GoldenSW Everything will be photorealistic when we lower the resolution enough to do it!
Sorry your PC isn’t good enough. You gotta use AI to de-blur. DLSS isn’t blurry, blur is a TAA thing.
@@Demmrir DLSS is crap man unless you are using it at 4k and most people aren’t. And even in those cases you only get rid of the blurriness, there’s still the ghosting. There’re tons of comparisons done by tech channels. But it’s true that it’s the least shitty form of upscaling.
Ray tracing has been both a blessing and a curse for gaming. On one hand we have visuals we could’ve only dreamed of years ago. On the other hand, games are much harder to run so devs have to rely too much on upscaling and frame generation. I play at 1440p and I can’t stand the softness and motion artifacts introduced by upscaling (even DLAA and native TAA feel too soft compared to no AA). I can’t even imagine how bad it is at 1080p which is still the most used resolution. Some games do offer you the option to use SMAA, but besides making the game much harder to run, you can tell they were not developed with that mind since there is shimmering everywhere, especially from specular highlights and any form of foliage.
I haven’t really noticed a difference in how good games have looked since about 2017.
I’d take no RT and sharp graphics than “next-gen” blurry mess with TAA and many other temporal solutions that smear the image. I honestly dislike this trend.
Show me ONE RT solution that isn’t noisy and don’t require temporal algorithms to smooth imperfections, then I’m sold.
In which games did you perceive DLAA to be blurry? Any anti-aliasing technique on a pixel-based screen will need to introduce some blur (which you are probably aware of) and I think DLAA has been quite incredible in how clear it remains without going for straight up super-sampling. It’s just that the performance impact is usually higher than I would like (as is the case with ray tracing).
fourth question – what hardware were used for these demos?
Usually a 4090
The current Witcher 4 (UE5) trailer was done with an unannounced RTX gpu
So basically these demos were done in RTX 5090 if not 4090s
@@sk.mahdeemahbubsamy2857 even then, the trailer says it’s per-rendered not real time.
RT is fine, but path tracing is many gpu gens out – RT correction GI is great, RT reflections are great, and neither has to be that heavy – I ran quite a nice looking Metro Exodus with all the bells and whistles on a 2070S, so its not like Rt NEEDS to be so heavy, but hey, some developers are just shyt at it and other dont care if their game runs like crap on the hardware most people have apparently.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I coulda swore we saw this paper a year ago and this is just a rehash of the previous one?
You can really see the smeariness of the lighting and how it’s not exactly realtime, still impressive but still not really ideal for anything with extreme pacing and detail density. The still screenshots of high intensity moments are bound to look horrible with this.
yep, delayed lighting gives me the same ick as when i’m looking at an ai generated video
@este_marco well it is probably using DLSS which is AI upscaler
@@damanraaj3496 the delay comes from the global illumination processing time, no?
I hate everyone who have been screaming about TAA. I was blissfully unaware of the blurring and didn’t notice it until they pointed it out now, it’s driving me insane.
it’s been obvious for years since around the start the the current console generation. most people just lacked the technical knowledge to know what was causing it.
I think UE5 needs to chill out and fix the lighting and rendering engine.
It’s getting out of hand. We need big names in the community to step up and speak out.
Watching these “advancements” of Unreal Engine alongside Threat Interactive breakdowns of Unreal Engine are a treat.
Having watched the Veritasium video on rainbows, real life kinda struggles making these caustics visible in colors, seeing it in a simulation is Matrix level of insanity. What a time to be alive!
I don’t have the skills to take advantage of the course you provided but I really appreciate your contribution to freedom of information. Thank you
idc until they make good antialiasing that is not blurry in motion
I would have never anticipated that the slight delay between the light source moving and the resulting shadows and reflections inherent to these techniques would be so off-putting. That’s a real uncanny valley effect for lighting and it’s funny that even the instantenous nature of stencil shadows in doom 3 looks less fake, in a way.
All these trade-offs in these path-tracing techniques scream “too much, too fast” and other games, for example the Demon Souls remake, have shown that the enormous amount of compute in modern gpus should be used to cleverly combine and refine already proven techniques to create stunning imagery that also remains much more coherent.