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The Coalition - Alpha Point Technical Demo and Character Rendering Test on Unreal Engine 5

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Vasto

Member
The Coalition share a real-time character rendering test on Xbox Series X and their first bits of discovery on what’s possible with next-gen character creation using Unreal Engine 5. This demo was showcased at #GDC21.






The Coalition present #AlphaPoint - an insight into the team's first tech demo created entirely in Unreal Engine 5. With Gears 5 pushing graphics to all new heights with Unreal Engine 4 back in 2019, the team is looking to the future and demonstrated an early look at what’s possible with Unreal Engine 5 on Xbox Series X|S. This demo was showcased at #GDC21.


 

kretos

Banned
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It looks fantastic, but I definitely don't like the idea of going more realistic for the art direction of a Gears of War game.

Gears always had its own distinct, almost comic-book-like rugged art style. Changing that now, just makes the series lose its established visual identity.
 

onesvenus

Member
It looks fantastic, but I definitely don't like the idea of going more realistic for the art direction of a Gears of War game.

Gears always had its own distinct, almost comic-book-like rugged art style. Changing that now, just makes the series lose its established visual identity.
Please, everyone who is technical minded, whatch this instead:


Some things to note:
- They are fully saturating XSX GPU
- They are currently ALU bound
- The streaming pool is quite small
- DCC tools are the bottleneck
- Need to change the way of doing some things on Nanite meshes due to limitations (i.e. no vertex paint on instances)

That seems to imply GPUs with more CUs will be able to squeeze it further
 
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Great Hair

Banned
Nice upgrade, but not a generational leap. We kind of peaked 2015. Stop wasting hardware resources on useless details. We need better lighting, animations ffs.

1.84 TFlops


There are two demos. One exclusively showcases lighting and environmental detail.

The character model they showed only has like 200k polygons. On par with the order characters so they are clearly focusing on realtime lighting, reflections, environmental detail (100 million+ polygons like nanite) instead of wasting them on character models.

They are doing exactly what you want them to.

The order characters were 100k tris at most, the character on the demo is almost 4x that. It's true that we are reaching diminishing returns but the details on one and other are not comparable

To me, the beard looks bad. Something is off with the hair compared with Mr. Moustache. Sure it has better shaders, better textures but we´re comparing a 3D game model from 2015 with one from 2021 using latest and greatest technology.

I was not that impressed with the girl flying around in the PS5 demo either. Maybe the guys behind The Order 1886 are simply better at their métier aka visual artists. I´m not yet impressed with the lighting at display here.

For one, the benchmark is scripted?, a fly through like 3D Mark 2001se (not cpu taxing at all). And the character, that beard looks, "feels" off. The beard from the mr.moustache (order) guy, could be a bitmap?, yet it "feels" more real to me.

The other does not cast shadows and looks like it´s "floating"? Looks better than this guy though :p

 
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Please, everyone who is technical minded, whatch this instead:


Some things to note:
- They are fully saturating XSX GPU
- They are currently ALU bound
- DCC tools are the bottleneck
- Need to change the way of doing some things on Nanite meshes due to limitations (i.e. no vertex paint on instances)

That seems to imply GPUs with more CUs will be able to squeeze it further

I do remember reading somewhere that the engine was compute heavy, so it would make sense it would scale well with CU count.

Regardless, it looks extremely promising across all platforms, I am really excited.
 
Nice upgrade, but not a generational leap. We kind of peaked 2014. Stop wasting hardware resources on useless details. We need better lighting, animations ffs.

1.84 TFlops

This!
It's good and all that now we can use so much more polygons, but I'm not seeing that much improvement.
I guess that this new demo reflects more a real shipping game, being on a smaller scale and less impressive than that tech demo Epic made for the PS5, but all this work is really worth it? In the end they are still outputting 1080/1440->4K at 30FPS. Can't they reduce the number of polygons to give us higher native resolutions at faster framerates? Or something like that? Actually use all this technology to make something creative instead of the same old sterile Gears worlds? Fuck this shit!
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
It looks fantastic, but I definitely don't like the idea of going more realistic for the art direction of a Gears of War game.

Gears always had its own distinct, almost comic-book-like rugged art style. Changing that now, just makes the series lose its established visual identity.
Good. The series feels dated. Time to shake things up.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Nice upgrade, but not a generational leap. We kind of peaked 2014. Stop wasting hardware resources on useless details. We need better lighting, animations ffs.

1.84 TFlops
There are two demos. One exclusively showcases lighting and environmental detail.

The character model they showed only has like 200k polygons. On par with the order characters so they are clearly focusing on realtime lighting, reflections, environmental detail (100 million+ polygons like nanite) instead of wasting them on character models.

They are doing exactly what you want them to.
 
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Dr Bass

Member
It looked good, but it didn't look even close to the UE5 reveal, so that seems odd. Shorter, less content, far less environment detail. Not sure I see the point.

But at least it seems like we will be getting games using the tech in the next couple years.
 

onesvenus

Member
Nice upgrade, but not a generational leap. We kind of peaked 2014. Stop wasting hardware resources on useless details. We need better lighting, animations ffs.

1.84 TFlops
The order characters were 100k tris at most, the character on the demo is almost 4x that. It's true that we are reaching diminishing returns but the details on one and other are not comparable

This!
It's good and all that now we can use so much more polygons, but I'm not seeing that much improvement.
I guess that this new demo reflects more a real shipping game, being on a smaller scale and less impressive than that tech demo Epic made for the PS5, but all this work is really worth it? In the end they are still outputting 1080/1440->4K at 30FPS. Can't they reduce the number of polygons to give us higher native resolutions at faster framerates? Or something like that? Actually use all this technology to make something creative instead of the same old sterile Gears worlds? Fuck this shit!
What's more taxing is Lumen, not Nanites, which seems to scale with the number of occluders and lights, not polygons. Having said that, the demo doesn't look like Gear's at all
 

nikolino840

Member
It looked good, but it didn't look even close to the UE5 reveal, so that seems odd. Shorter, less content, far less environment detail. Not sure I see the point.

But at least it seems like we will be getting games using the tech in the next couple years.
Epic worked for that demo half a year spending a million or so but was more a marketing for ps5 then a showcase for the industry imho
 

reksveks

Member
You know, the philosophy behind it goes back to the 1980s with the idea of REYES: Render Everything Your Eye Sees," says Tim Sweeney. "It's a funny acronym which means that given essentially infinite detail available, it's the engine's job to determine exactly what pixels need to be drawn in order to display it. It doesn't mean drawing all 10 billion polygons every frame because some of them are much, much smaller than the pixel.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...xt-gen-unreal-engine-running-on-playstation-5

This is the bases of my understanding but if anyone else has anything better, please share
 
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mrMUR_96

Member
The character is technically impressive but still looks gamey in terms of art direction. The environment didn't really scream next gen to me and was kinda bland.
I think it's less impressive because I've been so impressed with facial work in games like the last of us 2 and death stranding.
 
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