Unreal Engine 5.3 Is... Promising?

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Music: Monday Matinee - Justnormal.mp3

[@warrior-e_x_e]

"i wanted to make this real quick video" casually 30 minutes long lmao

[@BoroCG]

It means I had to edit out less of my rambling :D

[@gloriouslumi]

It might be worth getting deeper into Substrate in order to get that "touch of infinity". Substrate is essentially rendering parallax 3d textures on 2d surfaces to simulate depth. I'm curious just how deep you can go. Maybe a field of stars and galaxies, or a swirling vortex that seems to stretch forever? Seems like this lines up with your idea pretty well.

[@coolguy-xb2yn]

your performance issues are likely because of all that overdraw, since you're using lots of mesh cards. you can try turning on Early Z-Pass for opaque and masked meshes in rendering > optimizations section to see if that improves anything (it usually makes a massive difference). and if you are using lumen and dynamic lighting, make sure you turn off "allow static lighting" and "support stationary skylight" as having both of those off gives a big boost to material compilation

[@coolguy-xb2yn]

found out also that for the shadow cache issues on nanite foliage (which can tank framerate since lumen will recalculate tree shadows every single frame), you can now change the tree's "shadow cache invalidation" option from "auto" to "rigid," although i believe this will cause your trees that move via WPO to have static shadows, so it's a tradeoff

[@AnAncient76]

@@coolguy-xb2yn Is this "shadow cache invalidation" option available in 5.2?

[@coolguy-xb2yn]

@@AnAncient76 no, i don't think so. it's a new feature with 5.3

[@BoroCG]

Yeah it's this cool new thing in 5.3, but it's only making a difference with sunlight or other direct lights. My forest is only skylight. So the difference in my case is only for the flashlight

[@JayFolipurba]

You could even put a 2,5D wall around the 20m forest perimeter that looks like endless more stretches of dense forest, when it's literally only a few stacked 2D planes with images of dense foliage

[@ThatOneGuy-gd8jm]

Is that like painting backgrounds in old movies like The Wizard of Oz?

[@jerryone666]

​@@ThatOneGuy-gd8jmYes, and very common technique in game scenery.

[@imlostgaming9542]

@@jerryone666How would you go about doing it in unreal? Can I just photoshop and image and put it on a plane in unreal?

[@BoroCG]

May be worth a try, but I'd probably skip the 2.5D part, since 20m away there's little chance the parallax would be noticeable anyway

[@JayFolipurba]

@@imlostgaming9542 or prerender a forest in blender and use the created image as plane (highly customisable), but there are also free assets of "forest-planes" for backgrounds or low LOD. Basically any image of trees with alpha

[@VRDivision]

Good video my friend, and good luck with your game!

[@HBObiWan]

Hey Boro, been watching your stuff on and off for some time now, always cool to see what you do next and this is pretty cool, I really like what you're doing here. With regards to the performance issues. I haven't done this exact thing of course.. :) nor have I experimented with UE5 enough for any "real" suggestions, but what I'd consider doing to see how it works is break away the canopy into separate meshes. Meaning all leaves or rather all transparency. So in that case you can use maybe traditional static meshes for those and use aggressive LOD on them while still using Nanite for solid models like trunks and branches and such. You can use smooth LOD transitions to reduce popping. This should help cut back on overdraw greatly. Not sure how it'll play out with Lumen exactly but should be ok. Also as mentioned by another commenter, consider using walls to cull things where and how it makes sense, etc. Should work well since you're making corridors, essentially. I think either way, you may need to treat the transparency separately, break them away from the tree models, whether you use them with Nanite or not, or whatever you do there, because they are the main problem area and it'll be easier to hide the side effects created for the sake of performance then anyway. I was also going to mention (I saw someone did already anyway) to go into your project settings and disable "allow static lighting", it actually can affect the performance if you're only using dynamic lights. You can also disable "support stationary skylight", for that reduced shader compilations. Maybe some of this helps, maybe not, but it'll always help to simplify things, it's all about that optimization, regardless of the engine, or engine features. I wish you all the best with your project, it looks like a real fun project.. :)

[@R0w4nH0pk1ns]

yo those rings on the monster look sick

[@stunthumb]

One small thing on masked textures. There is support for HLSL Discard... not had a chance to experiment, but if you made a custom HLSL shader, maybe using discard is a good way to improve masking performance - like avoid as many calculations as you can by doing them in a custom shader only if the alpha mask applies. Might be especially good for shaders that blend textures together together. In GLSL at least, Discard skips the shader operations completely, so can make a significant difference to performance with that (no matrix math etc). With 5.3 coming soon it's difficult to justify experimenting too much if they're changing things.

[@Just-CDR]

For me disabling virtual shadow maps and nanite added around 30+ fps. Hope it gets better optimized in future!

[@JacobAthias]

If you need more culling, use more big trees and rocks and adjust your terrain so the ground can offer culling. More enormous trees will also work as landmarks so the player knows where they are If your game is going to be run at night... you won't need all those details, especially on the trees' top.

[@BoroCG]

Yeah these are great tips, I'm planning to do more of the big rocks, maybe giant trees too

[@thedoctor5478]

Optimizing cooling seems solvable by Epic despite also seeming difficult.

[@crs11becausecrs10wastaken]

Just curious if you considered installing Nvidia DLSS if your GPU supports it? I've noticed a considerable performance improvement in doing so.

[@BoroCG]

I am actually using it, gives a few extra frames while making the image blurrier than TSR. However DLSS looks much cleaner in movement

[@JPWestmas]

It looks like you are rendering translucency in those leaves. That can't be cheap to render. Also, alpha rendering has always been the number one bane of real time rendering. I'm actually shocked your scene is rendering at all with all those leaves. There might be a different material option for rendering your alpha that wouldn't be that heavy. You could surround the trees with rock formations that wouldn't have alpha to draw and still block out that super bright skybox that is visible through the trees.

[@rickysargulesh1053]

Boro you need to look into shader precompilation for your final delivery of the game. It's the biggest issue with Unreal Engine. The first time you play a game it will stutter like hell but at a second run it will be fine and with much better performance. But usually you don't play a level with stuttering so you can play it again smoothly the second time. It is soooo important and the earlier you look into it the better. Digital Foundry complains about this issue with every UE game being released.

[@BoroCG]

Yeah that's definitely on the list

[@alonsozumbado7191]

Hey Boro! It's been a while since I've checked your channel, have you changed it to just a 3D channel over 2D art? Not complaining tho, love this new stuff!

[@BoroCG]

Hi! Well I'm working on this horror game these days, so the channel is about that. Games take a while to make. At the moment I don't feel like I'll go back to painting-only content when I'm done with it. Maybe 3D-animation/shorts, but most likely - another game or something. It's a long journey anyway

[@alonsozumbado7191]

@@BoroCG 3d animation sounds great, hopefully we'll see some of that in the future! But I'm glad to see you still making badass and creepy stuff! ✌️

[@rohaanallport677]

Took me a while to figure out this one. Building my project 5.3. I'm in a similar boat as you are. just piles of broken versions of my project. The Likely reason your project can't build, or use standalone is because we should use Visual Studio 2022 (17.4 or later). I know the docs says we can use 2019, but I'm sure many of us know here that the UE documentation has a fair bit of mistakes and errors. So trye VS 2022 and good luck!

[@BoroCG]

Oh thank you, and it's good to know, but I'm actually using VS 2022. And since the final 5.3 came out, it's totally been building without a problem. It's also very stable now, too. So it was just the 5.3 Preview thing.

[@nowherebrain]

that indirect lighting bug makes no sense...but it's clearly there...I hope that's not going to be in final.

[@unrealengine5-storm713]

The thing about PBR materials is it's not really physically based. It basically just a bunch of masks to enable/disable effects in the shader. Substrate is a different rendering method and uses physical properties to measure how light interacts at/through/around the surface. It's very expensive and not feasible for real time games IMO ..at least not yet.

[@homeblue7667]

The Unreal Team is definitely taking notes ✍

[@horemustjugen6677]

Did you make this level? or is it an asset pack? been looking for something similar

[@BoroCG]

The forest assets are from Quixel Megascans library, which is free for UE

[@gabrielkardos4342]

I'm running lumen nanite and virtual shadows at more than 80fps in viewport at epic rendering quality with a rtx 2060 desktop gpu and i7 7700, I can full screen my render view in pie and run around 60 to 70 at 1080p. So idk what the issue might be, I even find my self bumping up the final gather quality and some other settings to increase stability. Small scene mind you but still I wonder how with proper optimisation this could not scale to a larger scene.

[@BoroCG]

I can do that as well, without the Megascans forest. It's all about what you see in the scene I think

[@arek2505]

Do You know how to use megascans trees ect in UE 5.3? I am quite new with using Unreal and find it difficult to solve. I decided to use 5.3 becouse of better VR performance but library from 5.2 does not work

[@TorQueMoD]

Doesn't UE5 support nanite foliage? Because actually modeling the leaves would save on overdraw and if nanite can auto LOD the geo, then it should be faster.

[@GES1985]

I want to see the pcg splines get used for building floors/walls/roofs/etc instead of the overly-tiled looking buildings in ark or conan. Dungeons too. We need a Daggerfall 2.0 with unreal pcg

[@thehappyee]

i have i silly goofy idea for the game, since nanite cant work with animated objects, and trees usually wiggle, what if you like distorted them in a post-processing shader.

[@BoroCG]

Good thinking, it's kind of almost how it's done usually. Only not in post-process shader, since it would look like insanity, distorting everything in front and behind a branch. Instead, it's done in the material shader of the foliage. World Position Offset is the cheapest type of animation that does 3D-distortion to vertices. And, it works with Nanite. Makes things a bit heavier for shadows and pretty much everything else, so it's best to limit it to work at a small radius around the camera. I used it before, turned it off for now.

[@thehappyee]

@@BoroCG ah cool, idk much about unreal engine, just like an overview.

[@wilted_kale]

you're a beautiful human being

[@SuMiTMeshram25]

this meta human host is so realistic

[@veritas7010]

Imagine mirrors worked..

[@Kickin0u0in0the0nut]

Why dont you just use auto lod and not nanite for your tress?

[@dhirajambre]

i miss borodan†e.

[@BoroCG]

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[@unrealengine5-storm713]

If they can increase the performance by 20% that's fairly substantial. Unfortunately this will only make a difference if that is your bottleneck in the scene

[@stunthumb]

I have a lot to comment... sorry! - First... when did you last actually go to a forest?, I mean a real forest that isn't just a park for people walking dogs and gentle mountainbiking. The forest you're making is not a forest, the way you're making it won't perform well, you are WAY overthinking and not actually considering what you want to achieve. Any real forest is dark, like pitch black silhouttes and that's about it, that's about all you would need... like good details on a border, but pitch black inside. Several layers of foliage and tree silhouttes and absolute minimal lighting along the path, shining through dense tree's that you never need to get close to. That's the other thing about forests... they're usually inpenetrable, like mad tree roots, pitch black, sharp branches... you can die in a forest quite easily. The canopy is always so dense that human visible sunlight just doesn't get through - the light should come from the distance, shadows should float in the dense air. Do far far more with less is what I'm saying - just because the suns out doesn't guarantee someone light... if the player can't see what they're walking through its because they wouldn't damn see what they'd hate to have to be walking through! - so why spend hours on detail that shouldn't be seen?. I say you should avoid Nanite and use traditional masking with dark silhoutte textures, lots of them, but low poly so you'll get a good frame rate and have full control. Also, don't be too quick to give a player a light source - sometimes hiding in the dark is the safest option.... Jet black tree trunks and layered cannopy, billboard foliage and twigs all over the place, low poly and cheap, build layers of cold black detail and it'll feel like a real forest. Anyways, love these videos thank you - sorry about the rant, it is mostly born of the way Unreal tries to make us do things its way... as if we're all working with Disney IP or something.

[@PNP_9]

How long are guys have to get is game ?

[@nocultist7050]

UE5 gets way too much praise. For most people this amazing features are not even remotely realtime. It is nice for movies and for level design prototyping but everything still needs handmade LODs and loads of other optimisations. And cubemap lights and reflections still give so great results for infinitly lower performence cost that Valve uses it still today for Alyx and CS2

[@ViktorsJournal]

Well, there's also the thing he is still getting used to this and learning. Lumen is for sure expensive but it was never supposed to be cheap, he has other options for the lighting as well as the shadows. Nanite can actually drop peformance for you in same cases but it can also hugely improve performance. You need to learn what to use, where and how. They are also still working on it pushing these systems forward. I had a scene where nanite just really killed it and other scenes where just switching nanite suddenly made the game have no performance issues on a low end HW. The systems are still great but it're not a one button solution for sure :).

[@rickysargulesh1053]

I 100% agree with you. I think you could achieve very nice results on UE4 as well. just look at Jedi Survivor. Optimizing is a crucial and tedious part that you can't ignore. you can only bruteforce through bad optimisation with a 4080/4090. If Daniel wants the game to be accesible to a lot of people he needs to optimize a lot more. but we are just at the beginning here

[@captureinsidethesound]

"everything still needs handmade..." Yes, you still have to do some manual work. What are you expecting?

[@Sweenus987]

I would disagree on everything still needing handmade LODs as you can put in a 1mil tri mesh and cap the tris so that no more than 10k would ever be shown. Nanite itself handles any and all LOD work

[@captureinsidethesound]

@@rickysargulesh1053 , I might be wrong but from my understanding, he can’t really optimize the project for NVIDIA users because the Engine is programmed using DX12. NVIDIA is more geared towards DX11 - series processing. AMD GPUs where designed for DirectX12/low-level APIs since so GCN/RDNA cards plow through code nearly down to the metal. The fact that NVIDIA needs nearly twice as many cores to equal AMD in pure shader-core performance is very evident. AMD could have easily added a second silicon for real-time processing but that’s actually going backwards and huge headache for developers due to drivers. The Engine doesn’t just automatically send all real-time instructions to these RTX dedicated cores - they need to be directed with drivers provided by NVIDIA, right?

[@selimsaidi378]

wanting some performance with a laptop XD !! things that amaze me is that actualy you can run this scene on your hardware !!! ue5 in dev still need some power to make things ! and optimisation for low configuration is an other work !!! there is no magical solution !!! just some tweaks to learn

[@BoroCG]

Well I play Cyberpunk with path tracing on this laptop, so

[@selimsaidi378]

you cannot compare a game, resource-intensive, to a video game engine, the game in question has precisely been optimized by its developer so that you can play it in good condition. it is your work to do optimisation when you open unreal engine !

[@BoroCG]

Yeah. That's the thing I'm working on right now. Why are you yelling though?

[@selimsaidi378]

@@BoroCG in your video you talk about no improvement because lack of performance. But clearly there is big improvement in the last version . Never mind. Take care .

[@captureinsidethesound]

NVIDIA won with DirectX 11. AMD wins with DirectX 12. You should read more into the details in why but in short, NVIDIA relies on dedicated cores in which require annoying drivers for anything real-time because their shader-core technology doesn't handle it well. Your project is a huge example of this. I bet you would not be facing these issues with an AMD RX alternative. Ive always owned NVIDIA cards but recently I switched over to AMD even though I still use my RTX rig for Blender projects. AMD and Apple gave developers what they asked for in which was a single silicon solution where they didn't have to rely of drivers to do custom /complex calculations. Big budget studios have the money to wait on custom drivers but indy/home studios do not. Yes, dedicated cores will always win in performance but that's assuming the game is optimized with all the required drivers.

[@xnet-pvzok728]

No matter how good you make your game look if you don't fix that camera and FOV it's gonna be unplayable.

[@plasid2]

Finally somone tell true, not all time oh ah everywere and if you try little critize you are calling dumb, for me UE5 sucks, terrible performance, they make hundred system I am not even sure what I should start using, everywere mess and not working as should

[@bob-joe]

*_You should make details and survival stuff for it like sanity, hydration, hunger, ammo, and energy by adding berries or water in some places if your gonna be there for a while. Also you can consider adding sounds and more like the monsters maybe like make a eerie breathing sound and the gun needs to be WAY louder for realism because guns are loud._*

[@MonsterJuiced]

You just listed a bunch of features that have been documented as some of the sole reasons people hated the games that included them.

[@BullGames-wh6fw]

​@@MonsterJuicedYes, as a living person suffering from hydration, hunger, and loud gunshots, i can agree i hate life.

[@bob-joe]

​@@MonsterJuiced🤓☝️

[@MonsterJuiced]

@@BullGames-wh6fw lmao well imagine you're in a horror game like this but you also have to be concerned with your hydration, you have limited energy which is never enough and you have a hunger issue. This means the game needs to be balanced around these features which has the knock on effect of being very inconvenient just as an excuse to remind the player "sorry you can't run away, you are hungry and also now your energy is depleted after 3 seconds of running" which are mechanics mainly to hinder the player because you don't know when you're going to have to run away. You might think you can plan for this by stocking up. Well if the game lets you stock up then what's the point in having these issues? They become annoying time wasters to cap. Otherwise if you're in the middle of stocking up and you get ambushed but you're too low on hunger or hydration that'll drain your energy faster and you'll not be able to fight back properly or out-run the threat. This will immediately take the player out of the game because it wasn't their fault they died. The fun part of these games are exploring, looking for clues, putting the story together and actually being able to run away and live then laugh about how scared you got. The first rule of game design is to never create mechanics that deliberately debilitate the player unnecessarily. So in Half-Life it was to not take control away from the player during story moments which increases immersion. In many RPG's and survival like Resident Evil or Bioshock it's to let them run forever, climb, escape, plan. Remember Bob-Joe, if these mechanics were so good, they would be popular but they're not because they are annoying. Remember Far Cry with the heal wounds mechanic? You'd have to pointlessly waste time patching a wound regularly and this creates boredom and issues in game design because you can't plan around it. Sometimes you have to sacrifice life-like mechanics for immersion and engagement which = fun. The fun part of game design is to reduce as much mechanically as possible to allow the player maximum freedom and immersion according to the logic of the game-world. Dishonored is a good example. The more immersed the player is, the more fun you can have by planning experiences, jumps, scares, tension, comedy around them without having to worry whether the player could be too hungry to react which kills the moment.

[@BullGames-wh6fw]

​@@bob-joehe got a point tho. It would probably be alright if it was a open world game tho.