Unreal Engine 5.5 MegaLights Demo - Massive Up to 50% Performance Boost and Better Image Quality

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Please give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and feel free to comment below or ask me anything. It will help me to get recognized by youtube's algorithm. Thanks! :) Timecodes: ○ 0:00 - Side-by-Side Comparison at 4K DLSS 3.8 Balanced ○ 3:03 - 4K DLAA with MegaLights On ○ 5:03 - 4K DLSS 3.8 Balanced with MegaLights On ○ 7:09 - 1440p DLAA with MegaLights On ○ 9:13 - 1440p DLSS 3.8 Quality with MegaLights On ○ 10:49 - 1080p DLAA with MegaLights On ○ 12:28 - 1080p DLSS 3.8 Quality with MegaLights On

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

A few important notes: 1. MegaLights is a whole new direct lighting path in Unreal Engine 5.5, enabling artists to place orders of magnitudes more dynamic and shadowed area lights than they could ever before. It's not only reduces the cost of dynamic shadowing, it also reduces the cost of unshadowed light evaluation, making it possible to use expensive light sources, such as textured area lights. In short, MegaLights is very similar to NVIDIA's RTXDI (RTX Dynamic Illumination). 2. As this feature heavily utilizes Ray Tracing, Hardware Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps are required for MegaLights. 3. The performance difference depends on how many shadow casting lights are in the scene. The more shadow casting lights are visible, the bigger performance improvement will be with MegaLights enabled.

[@bmqww223]

so free performance and better visual will take it

[@muhammedabdelhameed5274]

VSMs are not used with MegaLights, only ray traced shadows is used.

[@kevgamerrandom2583]

How to enable the first person camera mode

[@robertoevans8438]

1:25 just look at the armor bracer and how even with hardware lumen the shadows are completely missing there. With megalights it's lit with proper shadowing, looks a lot better and has higher fps at the same time!

[@zackfair_og]

Crazy how it has better FPS. I wonder why it looks better AND has better FPS.

[@gagool3434]

@@zackfair_og because megalight lowing light resolution

[@dx48.]

Damn. I wish games had this level of detail.

[@hq2136]

stalker 2?

[@blackface-b1v]

They do It's just that ur gpu wouldn't be able to handle it

[@sheeshbal]

@@hq2136 trash game

[@PuppetMasterdaath144]

@@sheeshbal stop talking bad about yourself

[@Accuaro]

@@blackface-b1v True, but also textures make a whole lot of difference and that loads into VRAM. Nvidia is stingy with VRAM.

[@huggywuggy594]

i subscribed because you deserve it

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Thank you!

[@IHaveBadWiFiBro]

stalker 2 needs this omggggggg

[@fpgamemearray]

my question is: does megalight give e performance boost only when an obscene amount of dynamic lights are rendered in frame? would it boost stalker 2 performance if enabled?

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Yeah, Megalights would definitely boost Stalker 2 performance if it was supported there.

[@theantsaretakingover]

⁠@@MxBenchmarkPCno I don’t think it would. Stalker 2 has an extremely low amount of lights, and very little direct illumination. It might make shadows a lot better, but performance definitely won’t be improved much, and may actually take a big hit.

[@hungnguyenBánhMìBùKhu2612]

@@theantsaretakingover Megalight actually doesn't cost more to render than virtual shadow maps and is definitely faster than ray-traced shadow

[@theantsaretakingover]

@@hungnguyenBánhMìBùKhu2612 well then like I said performance wouldn’t really be improved. However, overall quality would go up, so I’d consider it a win.

[@acadiachair]

Did you just download more frames?

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Megalights is a feature that developers need to enable in their UE 5.5 projects, it's not something external or a plugin.

[@Sega-q6p]

Amazing

[@nicknickname353]

Megalights looks blurry does it use any sort of AI? kinda messes with the picture the way Ray Rec does

[@lawnmanGman]

uses temporal data mate, so it is a smudge fest in movement. obv rt does as well, baked lights are way better

[@ferasnj5769]

can games already released be able to use megalights ? or only games developed on ue 5.5 ?

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Only UE 5.5 games. Some already released games could be updated to UE 5.5, but I don't know how difficult it would be, depends on a game really.

[@gamegame6089]

@@MxBenchmarkPC if the game mostly coded with blueprint then good luck porting to ue 5.5, it will break left and right, up and down. If most of the source are C++ then its much easier to change version.

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

@gamegame6089 good to know.

[@MANUDRAGONHD]

How can i activate the megalights, remove depth of field and the black bars and set to 1st person? thanks.

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Megalights is enabled by default in this demo. You can access the 1st person mode through debug mode (press ";")

[@lawnmanGman]

them lights and scene dont look like they move, it should be baked the frames would double instantly (unless you are a sucker who went for a 128bit nvidia crapper)

[@diefontanelle1468]

fix stuttering, everything else doesn't matter

[@ryanskelton9548]

at 4:21 the way the light comes in from the window just looks so strange to me, the shadow being cast through the air and it just looks off.

[@SCSITerminator]

The download limit from google drive has been exceeded. You need to create put a torrent up for the compiled demo.

[@ItsAkile]

Pretty nice resukts

[@Dr.D00p]

Got their priorities wrong. Instead of continually adding shiny new features they should stop and fix the fundamentally broken aspects of UE like shader compilation stutter and traversal stutter that have been ruining open world PC games for the last 10yrs+ when using their crappy, resource hog of an engine.

[@gamegame6089]

Satisfactory on unreal did good, i think most open world games just poorly coded.

[@DerpDerpson]

Days gone was running on heavily tinkered UE4 which was the worst iteration of the engine to make open world games on and it's one of the smoothest open world games out there.

[@nprocopi1231]

In case you're not paying attention, UE 5.5 let's you bake shader cache, and initialize all d3d12 pipelines/shaders in the loading screen. It's a lot better than it used to be

[@lawnmanGman]

@@gamegame6089 nanite lumen (up to 5.4) totally sucked, now lumen is better but nanite was a scam and megalights is also a scam, its all bs

[@PuppetMasterdaath144]

I have zero stutter ur just another mental online

[@Sofian375]

Why the skylight disappeared in the first scene?

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

It's light leaking, a common issue with software lumen, which was fixed with hardware lumen.

[@soulsborne84]

really amazing demo!! but how i can enable megalights? i can´t see the option

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Megalights is enabled by default in this demo.

[@RoboMagician]

what does this entail?

[@rinostellone4467]

hi MxBenchmarkPC please tell me how to disable megalights via console command or ini file????

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

r.MegaLights.allowed 0

[@sarbazaryamehr]

Please also test with rtx 3060 😅

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Noted.

[@sluckydog657]

NO STALKER 2? wt4 gsc

[@bananaboy482]

INB4 threat interactive comes and says something stupid like "Uhm actually if you spent 10 hours optimizing the scene it will be more optimized 🤓👆"

[@Accuaro]

Keep trying to discredit him, he's 100% right.

He's not dumb. He has lots of valid points. Game optimization is cooked. Developers don't care anymore when they can just do everything in real-time. And in case of bad performance, just use noisy, blurry, unstable DLSS, and input latency increasing Frame Generation. Many games' visuals and world size don't justify the need of these techs. Yet, you need them in order to get acceptable performance. UE5 is an amazing tool for developers, cutting development time a lot shorter, it's always the end user who suffers their laziness.

[@Accuaro]

Exactly, "Oh no how could we ask the developers to spend more time optimising for the vast majority of gamers?!11" They hate him because he's rightfully calling out the lazy and sometimes ineptitude of game devs using bandaid perf fixes with image recontruction tech (fsr, dlss, xess).

[@unclexbox85]

@@Accuaro Well maybe if you did ask the devs you would get a response why there isn't more time being spent

[@SkemeKOS]

So SW Lumen and HW Lumen are completely irrelevant now? Asking as someone who is very new to Unreal Engine

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Nope, Lumen is still one of the most important features in UE5.

[@josecangrejo3086]

Lumen software + Megaligth?

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

Not supported at the moment.

[@bananaboy482]

If you're already using HW tracing for megalights might as well switch from software GI to hardware GI and reuse some of that work.

[@MatthiasLindemann-hp2zr]

Every image with MegaLights looks worse, dark corners are now much darker because the MegaLights come at the expense of the bounces. If every MegaLight supported "bounces", every PC would collapse under the load. That's why the FPS is higher in images with MegaLights because there are fewer bounces. The images look best with hardware lumens.

[@no-pie]

Much more versatile.

[@borderlands3videos659]

Compiling shaders...

[@gamernippel]

70fps 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 EPIC FAiL

[@SimeonRadivoev]

So it can't hit 60fps at 1440p without upscaling for a static environment on a 1200$ video card

[@jamesmuking]

After wayching threat interactive, ue5 really seems so bad

[@TheMahtimursu]

SW lumen looks significantly better thant HW lumen or MegaLights?

[@marianvdovin2455]

lumen is a joke. only path tracing

[@blackface-b1v]

Path tracing looks better but is also more demanding

[@a2raya772]

Lumen isn't bad

[@lawnmanGman]

enjoy path tracing with interpolated frames then, cause that is less of a joke right?

[@AIMingMusic]

Imagine calling this a Tech Demo and posting a link to the wrong asset. Medieval Village - Slavic Huts environment will avoid this channel. Misinformation is the worst kind.

[@MxBenchmarkPC]

It was a mistake, thanks for pointing out. The link is fixed now.