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

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Matsuchezz

Member
That human model, means nothing if animation is not top notch. Kind of a disappointing demo. I liked the UE 5 unveiling more. This kind of detail is needed only for cinematics. I do not see the practical use to have this level of detail for an ingame model, unless on extreme close ups during gameplay where the camera is really close to the character when is covering from gunfire. And cinematics is what a "a lot"(really a few) of gamers really hate.
 

Darius87

Member
This demo ran at a average of 46fps, while the PS5 demo was not 1440p either. It was dynamic resolution with the average just coming in at under 1440p.
PS5 land of nanite demo is ~2496x1404p actually should reach above coalition demo at max 1440p while in reality it should be other way around given that XSX has 2 more Tflops also dev said PS5 is comfortably in budget for 60FPS games.
 

Saaleh

Banned
During the yesterday's presentation the guy listed what eats up the most computing power, with precise render times even, highlighted what/where are the bottlenecks (some aren't even related to the engine itself), and none of the things have anything to do with the I/O, like Lumen or TSR, they even listed precise both fixed and streaming memory pools, which are just mere tens-hundreds of MB (hence why PC's with ordinary 500Mbps SATA SSD outperform consoles). A simple drag and drop from Megascan collection will give the results you see on countless YT vids, but those kind of creations don't have a single gameplay-related line of code, no practical application, no nothing, it's just a static mesh, nothing more, whereas this demo takes into account assets and workflow that indeed takes place during an actual game development, the foliage doesn't even use Nanite for example, which leaves place for actual physics and animation for the actual games.
It is a Microsoft studio. So they wont go directly in the media and ask for what the ps5 is doing right because that will cause negative press and it will insult the xbox brand. It is clear from both the PS5 demo and Series x/s demo which one of them is using the UE5 features better and the reason for that is very clear. All the other bottlenecks are secondary and most of the improvements/optimisations will apply to both consoles.
 
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onesvenus

Member
They are a microsoft studio. So they wont go and ask for what the ps5 is doing right directly in the media because that will cause negative press and it will insult the xbox brand. It is clear from both the PS5 demo and Series x/s demo which one of them is using the UE5 features better and the reason for that is very clear. All the other bottlenecks are secondary and apply to both consoles.
So it's only your impression about the demos then? Because they never claimed anything regarding needing an I/O bandwith as big as PS5's. In fact, every time Epic talked about UE5, except from that first time, they have claimed Lumen to be the bottleneck on the engine and that doesn't have anything to do with I/O. If you look at youtube there are a lot of videos showing The valley of the Ancients demo running on mechanical HDDs without loss of performance.

Having big I/O bandwith will be better for some things but at least until now, we don't have any proof whatsoever that it will be beneficial for UE5 usage.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned


5hrg29.jpg
 

ToTTenTranz

Banned
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



There's also mention of a lack of RAM in the Series S.
And it doesn't like RAM-saving technologies like Sampler Feedback Streaming can take place in a software-driven renderer like Unreal Engine 5.
 

Saaleh

Banned
So it's only your impression about the demos then? Because they never claimed anything regarding needing an I/O bandwith as big as PS5's. In fact, every time Epic talked about UE5, except from that first time, they have claimed Lumen to be the bottleneck on the engine and that doesn't have anything to do with I/O. If you look at youtube there are a lot of videos showing The valley of the Ancients demo running on mechanical HDDs without loss of performance.

Having big I/O bandwith will be better for some things but at least until now, we don't have any proof whatsoever that it will be beneficial for UE5 usage.
Epic always said that their first demo can run on all platforms, but the quality will depend on the tech. we were waiting for the same demo or another demo running on series x that shows identical quality to the first demo. But we still don't have one. So for me the first demo is a Proof of why I/O is essential. Until another demo shows up to do just that, theory and demonstration indicate logically that this is the case. I'm assuming IF Microsoft catch up in pc space, i'm sure that they will release another hardware iteration that is even better than the ps5 i/o architecture. Then we can argue which studio is leveraging that high level i/o streaming. But for now, lets hope we see studios releasing games with this tech in the next 2 years... It is just more fun if this new demo was more impressive, sadly it isn't. But a good progress nonetheless. Compared to halo this is current gen and awesome.
 
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Zathalus

Member
2496x1404 IS pretty much 1440p (2560x1440) lol, and this was the average resolution for the entire demo.

g94jqKk.jpg
I never said it wasn't close to 1440p, just that it was dynamic as well. We have no idea what the XSX demo was averaging resolution wise, nor do we know what the FPS of the PS5 demo was other than a locked 30FPS.
 

INC

Member
So what the point of this? Not a game, just someone flexing UE5? Already hundreds of videos showing that.....

Should of made a ue5 Craig, for comparison
 

onesvenus

Member
Epic always said that their first demo can run on all platforms, but the quality will depend on the tech. we were waiting for the same demo or another demo running on series x that shows identical quality to the first demo. But we still don't have one. So for me the first demo is a Proof of why I/O is essential. Until another demo shows up to do just that, theory and demonstration indicate logically that this is the case. I'm assuming IF Microsoft catch up in pc space, i'm sure that they will release another hardware iteration that is even better than the ps5 i/o architecture. Then we can argue which studio is leveraging that high level i/o streaming. But for now, lets hope we see studios releasing games with this tech in the next 2 years... It is just more fun if this new demo was more impressive, sadly it isn't. But a good progress nonetheless. Compared to halo this is current gen and awesome.
Lack of evidence is not evidence in itself.
I suppose you agree when I say that this demo is proof of why some-random-tech-only-in-xsx is essential then. We don't have evidence of this demo running anywhere else
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
I never said it wasn't close to 1440p, just that it was dynamic as well. We have no idea what the XSX demo was averaging resolution wise, nor do we know what the FPS of the PS5 demo was other than a locked 30FPS.
I remember Epic engineers saying that the PS5 UE5 Demo ran at ~45 FPS, and can hit 60 FPS with further optimizations.
 

Saaleh

Banned
Lack of evidence is not evidence in itself.
I suppose you agree when I say that this demo is proof of why some-random-tech-only-in-xsx is essential then. We don't have evidence of this demo running anywhere else
Ray tracing can be done with a gtx1080 card. Likewise, UE5 features can be done with HDD, but it wont be the same quality as [SSD and PS5 I/O].

Unlike this demo, there were statements by the creators of the first Demo that this level of streaming requires [ps5's I/O architecture + ssd] and both [pc/seriesx lack that hardware tech]. To me, these 2 demos are proof of what they said, that's all i'm saying ^^. But all that is a temporary [fun/excitement/hype/wowfactor], what matter are the games.. Which company will impress us more.
 
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My prediction is that we will only see a fraction of this power being used on consoles and games simply due to scalability between Console and PC.
 

GymWolf

Member
That human model, means nothing if animation is not top notch. Kind of a disappointing demo. I liked the UE 5 unveiling more. This kind of detail is needed only for cinematics. I do not see the practical use to have this level of detail for an ingame model, unless on extreme close ups during gameplay where the camera is really close to the character when is covering from gunfire. And cinematics is what a "a lot"(really a few) of gamers really hate.
So much this.

I already scream internally thinking about these life like models animated like robots...

People talk about fucking rtx when animations are far more important, smh.
 

Riky

$MSFT
DF have been talking about the demo, interesting that The Coalition have already adjusted the engine and made their own adjustments, they said Bloom was one. Epic have wanted this feedback on what is and what isn't working well so it's good The Coalition are having a direct involvement in how the engine progresses.
 

Dural

Member
I guess it wasn't enough that the video was initially presented by a trans woman who starts her introduction by announcing her pronouns.

Yeah, I initially turned off the presentation as soon as I heard that. Is that really something we need to know when you're doing a tech presentation? SMH. I went back and skipped passed "her" part, the rest of the talk was really good though.
 

Shmunter

Member
Yeah, I initially turned off the presentation as soon as I heard that. Is that really something we need to know when you're doing a tech presentation? SMH. I went back and skipped passed "her" part, the rest of the talk was really good though.
And the rainbow flag in full prominence behind her. Live and let live, but you gotta laugh when people just make it all about themselves and their identity. Narcissistic complex.

Anyway, can’t believe I’m roped into this useless convo, lol
 

elliot5

Member
I guess it wasn't enough that the video was initially presented by a trans woman who starts her introduction by announcing her pronouns.
Microsoft's press releases with interviews and such do that, so get used to it. It's not that big of a deal.
Yeah, I initially turned off the presentation as soon as I heard that. Is that really something we need to know when you're doing a tech presentation? SMH. I went back and skipped passed "her" part, the rest of the talk was really good though.
Pretty petty and rude to use quotations there.
 

oldergamer

Member
How many people here are game developers? people saying they were disappointed by a presentation designed for game developers are stretching. To that i say "ok you didn't like it, so what??" it wasn't aimed at you anyway.

The response from most here was easy to predict.
 
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Tripolygon

Banned
I never said it wasn't close to 1440p, just that it was dynamic as well. We have no idea what the XSX demo was averaging resolution wise, nor do we know what the FPS of the PS5 demo was other than a locked 30FPS.
According to Alex from DF who watched the Alpha Point live presentation before it was released
Alex DF said:
They worded this a bit confusingly in the presentation. For the demo video out on Youtube it is locked at 30 fps and uses DRS to up image quality as much as possible, hence the floating internal resolution.

In the second half of the presentation when they mention 46 fps average, it is actually essentially running at 1080p (they call it 50% of 4K which actually is 50% axis scale of 4K) the entire time. They kind of say it an round about way probably because saying it is running at 1080p has bad PR optics, but makes a lot of sense for UE5.

That 46 fps average is basically at 1080p TSR-> 4K. That is why they spent the other portion of the presentation talking about 1080p TSR-> 4K quality, and gave out all the Lumen, Nanite, etc. performance numbers from 1080p TSR internal res.

Lumen in the land of Nanite PS5 Demo
Penwarden Epic said:
"So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit and then we can adapt to that. In the demo we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time."
 

Saaleh

Banned
Can you post some of those quotes? They never said that

'' the latter features a faster SSD and, according to Sweeney, is one of the reasons why the tech demo was unveiled using on the PS5 rather than on the Xbox Series X or even a PC. ''

He describes how PS5 renders a texture highly efficiently, fetching it from the high-speed SSD decompressed, into video memory in the exact place it's needed. This is thanks to PS5's IO (or input-output) system, which according to Epic's VP of engineering Nick Penwarden, is "the major innovation with the next-generation console hardware. They have faster CPUs, they have faster GPUs, and that was really important to be able to achieve the visuals that we showed – but the biggest change across console generations is absolutely going to be the IO bandwidth that we're able to achieve with the SSDs that are in next-generation consoles."

Pixels – and triangles. The buzzword of that tech demo is key to understanding how Nanite works, why PS5 has made it possible, and why it's such a huge leap forward. Import a film-quality asset such as a photogrammetry scan or ZBrush sculpt made up of millions of polygons – say, the statue in the tech demo – into Nanite, and the engine will automatically render it on a scalable triangle-per-pixel basis. The system memory preserves the infinite amount of detail from the model, but Nanite uses the speed of PS5's SSD to near-instantly stream in on demand only the data – and the triangles, be they millions or even billions – needed to display what the camera (and your eyes) are capable of seeing.

“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” he says. “It’s one thing to render everything that can fit in memory,” he adds, but a much more impressive feat to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously, as Sony’s new console and its M.2 solid-state drive are promising.

But for developers who do want to build games using the most up-to-date technology, UE5’s big advancements come in a pair of new development tools around graphical detail in objects and lighting, as well as a deep commitment from Epic to support next-gen game development. In fact, Sweeney says Epic has been working closely with Sony for years now on ensuring UE5 can best utilize the upcoming PlayStation's unique architecture.

“Sony has really done an awesome job of architecting a great system,” Sweeney says. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. They’re going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.’” The PS5, combined with tools like UE5, will enable “nothing but seamless, continuous worlds, and you can have this degree of fidelity going on for as many kilometers and gigabytes as you wish,” Sweeney adds.


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Extra:
ResetEra member Matt, who is a developer as well, revealed that the PS5's SSD will feature I/O speeds which are "on a whole other level." He states that while the Xbox Series X has a pretty great I/O setup which is better than what is available in the market right now, the PS5’s I/O "feels like it was taken from an IO-focused mid-gen upgrade 4 years from now." While the introduction of SSDs in both consoles will lead to significant advancements in gaming, the better overall setup of the PS5's SSD will allow developers to do things that can't be replicated on any other platform. Matt had earlier revealed that he had seen the PS5 in action himself.

 
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Tripolygon

Banned
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Extra:
In hindsight, I think what they are saying is that they chose PS5 to debut the demo because the IO subsystems are really impressive. That’s not to say same demo cannot be optimized to run on Series X at similar if not slightly better performance. In my opinion
 
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Saaleh

Banned
In hindsight, I think what they are saying is that they chose PS5 to debut the demo because the IO subsystems are really impressive. That’s not to say same demo cannot be optimized to run on Series X at similar if not slightly better performance. In my opinion
Yes even though we haven't seen it, it is possible, but we must take all the quotes into context.. :messenger_ghost:
 

Mr Rawnch

Neo Member
e1CbugB.png

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Extra:

I'd take it with a grain of salt. It seems like Sweeny was more impressed with the theoretical speed of the PS5's SSD, and they simply choose to go that route. These articles were published before the two consoles were released and real-world data has them pretty much neck and neck. It may have been their preference to go with the PS5 but, nothing would suggest that the Series X isn't capable of meeting the baseline performance standards of UE5. There's a lot of brilliant people working with the hardware in this industry, so nothing is impossible.

Taken from ScreenRant:

While it has been confirmed that the Xbox Series X supports the technologies that are featured in Unreal Engine 5, it isn’t entirely clear whether the console will be able to run the UE5 Tech Demo at the same graphical fidelity and performance as the PS5. Although some of the specifications of the Xbox Series X are said to be more powerful than the PS5 on paper, the latter features a faster SSD and, according to Sweeney, is one of the reasons why the tech demo was unveiled using on the PS5 rather than on the Xbox Series X or even a PC.

Regardless of whether the recently released UE5 tech demo runs exactly the same on the Xbox Series X or not, tech demos are canned experiences and are usually far from what actual released games on their respective consoles will look like.
So it will be exciting to see just how far game developers will be able to fully utilize and optimize the capabilities of the new game engine, whether they’re making titles for the PS5, Xbox Series X, or both.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
How many people here are game developers? people saying they were disappointed by a presentation designed for game developers are stretching. To that i say "ok you didn't like it, so what??" it wasn't aimed at you anyway.

The response from most here was easy to predict.

Yeah, there's a lot of cringe going around alright.. I guess the warring stands in the way of realizing the simple fact that this wasn't a Epic/Sony funded demo to sell the PS5 and UE5, but a test for The Coalition to see how it works for them, workflow and all.
 
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Saaleh

Banned
I'd take it with a grain of salt. It seems like Sweeny was more impressed with the theoretical speed of the PS5's SSD, and they simply choose to go that route. These articles were published before the two consoles were released and real-world data has them pretty much neck and neck. It may have been their preference to go with the PS5 but, nothing would suggest that the Series X isn't capable of meeting the baseline performance standards of UE5. There's a lot of brilliant people working with the hardware in this industry, so nothing is impossible.

Taken from ScreenRant:

While it has been confirmed that the Xbox Series X supports the technologies that are featured in Unreal Engine 5, it isn’t entirely clear whether the console will be able to run the UE5 Tech Demo at the same graphical fidelity and performance as the PS5. Although some of the specifications of the Xbox Series X are said to be more powerful than the PS5 on paper, the latter features a faster SSD and, according to Sweeney, is one of the reasons why the tech demo was unveiled using on the PS5 rather than on the Xbox Series X or even a PC.

Regardless of whether the recently released UE5 tech demo runs exactly the same on the Xbox Series X or not, tech demos are canned experiences and are usually far from what actual released games on their respective consoles will look like.
So it will be exciting to see just how far game developers will be able to fully utilize and optimize the capabilities of the new game engine, whether they’re making titles for the PS5, Xbox Series X, or both.
It is up to you to make sense of these sources. As long we are honest with each other it is ok to differ. Time will clear things for us.

You are right in that it is really exciting when we imagine it in both microsoft and sony games [like gears and games like days gone]. It will be a huge leap if they succeed.
 

JackMcGunns

Member
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






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




This is embarrassing, why post a last gen model which was already met by Ryse: Son of Rome on 1.21 TF lmao




UnTbgi1.png


B8zxTUG.gif
 

Mr Rawnch

Neo Member
It is up to you to make sense of these sources. As long we are honest with each other it is ok to differ. Time will clear things for us.

You are right in that it is really exciting when we imagine it in both microsoft and sony games [like gears and games like days gone]. It will be a huge leap if they succeed.
It's a great time for gaming in terms of tech. Developers have so many options to choose from in a sense they can pick a platform that best suits their overall vision.

I don't buy into the "this or that" narrative because companies are here today and gone tomorrow. I would've been heckled back in '92 if I mentioned Nintendo wouldn't be top dog and Sega was going to fold in 20 years. The brilliant minds behind the hardware are there for a paycheck and nothing suggests that they won't jump ship to be part of bigger and better things.

To get this kind of transparency from console makers in this day and age is unheard of. Television commercials were the main source of news and "entertainment" in the dawn of gaming. Sadly, some of us that grew up around that "good marketing" still have a skewed mindset of the gaming industry.
 

Dr Bass

Member
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
Just now seeing this but ... a lot of that work was building out the engine and the associated technology wasn't it? They expressly said part of their goals with UE5 was ease of content creation because they know how hard it is to create high quality assets at scale.

So in effect, you don't think the UE5 reveal, was a showcase for ... UE5 and where that engine was headed?

I'm not sure I understand your point. You're admitting the first demo was better looking and more complete but are saying that's because of ... marketing reasons? Huh?

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to get across.
 

nikolino840

Member
Just now seeing this but ... a lot of that work was building out the engine and the associated technology wasn't it? They expressly said part of their goals with UE5 was ease of content creation because they know how hard it is to create high quality assets at scale.

So in effect, you don't think the UE5 reveal, was a showcase for ... UE5 and where that engine was headed?

I'm not sure I understand your point. You're admitting the first demo was better looking and more complete but are saying that's because of ... marketing reasons? Huh?

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to get across.
No,i say the purpose is different,and epic worked in house

Work on the demo began in September of 2019 with a team of about two dozen developers from Epic Games and support studio Quixel, which it had acquired in the previous year

Same as coalition i think...
 

CamHostage

Member
No,i say the purpose is different...

Work on the demo began in September of 2019 with a team of about two dozen developers from Epic Games and support studio Quixel, which it had acquired in the previous year

Same as coalition i think...

Coalition started in November of 2020 (they modeled it some in October 2020 on UE4 before getting a pre-Early Access UE5 to switch over to.) I don't have a count, but it looked like there was a dozen or so developers on Alpha Point across that time (possibly off and on; some people just coming off projects, who knows how full-time it was for staffers over those 9 months.) They say it's 90% original materials, 10% off-the-shelf (at least, as far as Quixel assets went.)

I have not seen Epic Games' timeline for their demo, that Sept 2019, is that what they said? (They were obviously working on other things as well, primarily creating the engine itself as well as its interfaces, so as with Coalition, people may have been on and off the project over whatever that schedule was.)

So, it's 9 months for Alpha Point, and also 9 months for Lumen in Nanite... which, saying it now , doesn't feel great for the Coalition project when it's so, so much smaller than the Epic project (and Epic did a second one 11 months later that was equally huge,) but they are techncially different goals and asset approaches (original vs reuse.) Also, Coalition was busy with Hivebusters and finishing Gears 5 remaster and doing engine tests for Microsoft... although Epic was busy too making this whole danged engine.)
 
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CamHostage

Member
A tech demo after 8 months of release? Isn't that supposed to come before console launch?
Unreal 5 was NOT released 8 months ago. What are you talking about console launch for? This wasn't meant to be a Xbox hardware demo. it was a tech demo using unreal.

He's talking the console release.

Which, sure, it would have been awesome if UE5 was ready in Nov last year for the launch of Xbox Series X/S and PS5 (plus PC), but it wasn't, unfortunately. It's still a ways off, even though the preview builder is out and even though it feels like we should be seeing UE5 games by now, not UE5 demos.

Also, although it feels like these next-gen engines are supposed to be done when the next-gen consoles launch, that's actually normal that they're not. Neither UE4 nor UE3 had games ready for their respective console launches. The first UE3 games (Roboblitz and Gears of War 1) came out a full year after the Xbox 360 launch, and the first UE4 game (Daylight on PS4&PC) came out five months after next-gen consoles hit
 
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