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Unreal Engine 5.1 Update Out Now

Elder Legend

Elder Legend

Yoir Aee Member
Huge deal for consoles - 60 FPS for lumen/nanite for PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Patch notes

Unreal Engine 5.1 Released
The latest version of Unreal Engine 5 is ready to download on the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub! This release builds on the foundation of 5.0 with many improvements and quality of life features across the board.

Highlights
• Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps now support 60fps on next-gen consoles and PCs
• Virtual Assets beta enables faster syncs and smaller workspaces for Perforce
• On-demand shader compilation
• Large world coordinates for World Partition
• New In-Camera VFX editor
• New Soundscape plugin for procedural ambient sound generation
• Smart Objects and State Tree are now production ready
• And many more

Download it now from the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub. Go forth and make something Unreal!

Blog post: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-1-is-now-available

Release notes: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/unreal-engine-5.1-release-notes/
 
Jet Set Willy

Jet Set Willy

Member
The important bit for PC gamers:

DX12 PSO Compilation Improvements​

UE 5.1 aims to reduce stalls caused by shader compilation by starting to compile PSOs earlier, when components are loaded, rather than at the point where the object is rendered. This reduces or eliminates the need to manually gather PSO caches, which is a time-consuming process and cannot guarantee perfect coverage.

It is still possible to experience stalls if an object has to be rendered immediately after it's loaded. For the case of background streaming of distant objects, we've added the option to skip rendering the mesh until the PSO is ready, which trades stalls for delays in drawing these objects. Similarly, if a title needs to teleport the camera to a completely new location, or otherwise needs to display many new materials at once, there won't be enough time to compile all the PSOs. In this case, the game code needs to load the materials and meshes earlier, and hint the renderer ahead of time that it will need to draw them.

The existing PSO cache system can still work alongside the new system. It's possible to devise hybrid approaches, where there's a small, manually generated PSO cache containing materials which are known to be needed all the time, or are going to be used after a teleport event, and let the automatic system take care of most of the other materials.

This system is still under development and its performance will improve in future engine releases. It will also be expanded to support other RHIs, such as Vulkan.
 
Arioco

Arioco

Member
TonyK said:
I can't believe something like the Matrix demo could go from 1080p 24fps to 60fps with this or any update.
Click to expand...


Oh, it won't, so don't hold your breath, the demo is CPU bound anyways. It will probably run at 60 fps with some downgrades to lumen and nanite, but we're not going to get 60 fps with RTGI, RT reflectionn, RT shadows... and all the visual candy we saw in the demo.
 
mansoor1980

mansoor1980

Gold Member
• On-demand shader compilation

 
GenericUser

GenericUser

Member
TonyK said:
60fps support doesn't mean it will be used necessarily. I think is more like the 8K support on new consoles.

I can't believe something like the Matrix demo could go from 1080p 24fps to 60fps with this or any update.
Click to expand...
it says it supports the feature, it does not say that the current gen hardware is able to run you typical UE5 game in 60fps.
maybe some tetris clone made in UE5 will run in 60fps, but not a graphical intense game.
 
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TonyK

TonyK

Member
GenericUser said:
it says it supports the feature, it does not say that the current gen hardware is able to run you typical UE5 game in 60fps.
maybe some tetris clone made in UE5 will run in 60fps, but not a graphical intense game.
Click to expand...
I understood the same, but I fear some people will think this update opens the door to U5 AAA games at 60fps.
 
JackMcGunns

JackMcGunns

Member
Neilg said:
yeah the matrix demo dipping under 30 wont get some magical performance increase just because the tools now support being ran at 60fps. it's an important engine feature but doesnt mean anything.
Click to expand...


So many developers chiming in, this is great. Has Gaf ever had that many VIP visitors?


On a serious note, I doubt anyone is expecting The Matrix UE5 demo to magically run 60fps, but what we can expect is another tech demo of UE5 running 60fps with an amazing presentation that blows away other console 60fps games away.
 
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bentanchorbolt

bentanchorbolt

Banned
UE5 Matrix demo running poorly on current-gen machines is irrelevant IMO. UE5 will always be improving as will the techniques of developers using it. I suspect if they were to remake the demo two years from now with the same hardware but using what they have learned plus engine updates, the demo would both look and run much better. Such is ALWAYS the case with games as the generations go on.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
JackMcGunns said:
So many developers chiming in, this is great. Has Gaf ever had that many VIP visitors?


On a serious note, I doubt anyone is expecting The Matrix UE5 demo to magically run 60fps, but what we can expect is another tech demo of UE5 running 60fps with an amazing presentation that blows away other console 60fps games away.
Click to expand...

....So then, why did you go and make the same sin of assumption without technical knowledge that you accuse others on this forum of?

If we're all just talking here, then fine, let's talk. (And hopefully some people with hands-on experience with UE and maybe even console production will weigh in.) But if we're only allowed to comment if we're in the know, then everybody's going to need to study up. There is documentation out there of the various performance modes and settings toggles for UE 5.1 (which has been in developers' hands since Oct 6.) There is widely available video of UE 5.1 Preview (and now Release) used in developer projects and instructional demonstrations. And of course, there is UE 5.1 itself, which is free to obtain and easily installable on PC, Macintosh, and Linux consumer-level computers.

Probably a good place to start is in the UE 5.1 Documentation Lumen Technical Details page, which goes into a rough overview of this Global Illumination / Reflections system:

Lumen's Global Illumination and Reflections primary shipping target is to support large, open worlds running at 60 frames per second (FPS) on next-generation consoles. The engine's High scalability level contains settings for Lumen targeting 60 FPS.

Lumen's secondary focus is on clean indoor lighting at 30 FPS on next-generation consoles. The engine's Epic scalability level produces around 8 milliseconds (ms) on next-generation consoles for global illumination and reflections at 1080p internal resolution, relying on Temporal Super Resolution to output at quality approaching native 4K.
Click to expand...

Okay, so, now that we're all on our way to being expert developers, let's talk!

(*There is unlikely to be any more tech demos of UE5 released for consoles. Matrix Awakens itself was the first of its kind released to home platforms, and trade show demos tend not to go through the process of compiling and deploying a console version. Maybe, I guess, we could see a UE 5.XX demo shown at CES on a console if it's really compelling for developers in unexpected ways? Either way though, we're at the point where actual retail games using UE 5 are coming to market next year.)
 
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CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Mister Wolf said:
I wonder what will be the first released game to utilize Lumen. Maybe that Silent Hill 2 Remake.
Click to expand...

Tough to answer, because commercial games using Unreal Engine are coming out early next year (and of course Fortnite has been out in its rebuilt UE5 version since last December,) but many of them will still use fallback methods or external development tools (particularly Lumen, where there are a number of pre-existing GI services like Enlighten which developers are used to, and Lumen is very cool but it still has drawbacks that might deter developers from switching over.)

Of the games that have announced UE5 as its development tool that are nearing to market, here's what I'm seeing of release dates and what we know of their productions.

* Fortnite is out, unclear if it bothered to adapt to Lumen
* The First Descendant doesn't have a date, but it already had a public beta on PC (so people have already played this game at home.) I don't know if that uses Lumen though? It's a cross-gen UE5 project, so either it has its own GI solution or it falls back to other methods on past-gen devices.
* Layers of Fear has a Q1 2023 release date
* STALKER 2 would have already been out, but it got pushed back. I would guess they did not convert their lighting system to Lumen since they have been working on full production rather than engine work for all of UE5's availability (though they did show off experimentation with Nanite and maybe that migrated in without incident?)
* Mortal Rite is Q2
* Mortal Online 2 is upgrading to UE5 (this MMO is already out) but no answer on when to expect that.
* Redfall missed its 2022 date but assumptions are that it will be done in the first half , maybe we'll see surprise release date announcement at something like TGAs. (Actually, is there confirmation that Redfall is on UE5? I see it mentioned everywhere as a UE5 production, but not anywhere that specifically cites Bethesda or Arkane saying anything other than Unreal Engine.)
* R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos and R-Type Final 3 Evolved are coming out in March, but I would personally be surprised (pleasantly surprised) if those use many next-gen features (Final 3 is a PS5-exclusive, though that may just be a marketing approach; Tactics 1+2 are cross-gen including Switch)

And then, on the PC side, there are "games" out which you can go get and play which use baseline UE5 features, including Nanite and Lumen. Low Light Combat is one that probably shows off Lumen most easily (despite it being over a year old and primarily being a Game Jam quickie,) so check that out if you have a PC you want to try UE5 on and are tired of City Sample.

 
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Elder Legend

Elder Legend

Yoir Aee Member
CamHostage said:
Tough to answer, because commercial games using Unreal Engine are coming out early next year (and of course Fortnite has been out in its rebuilt UE5 version since last December,) but many of them will still use fallback methods or external development tools (particularly Lumen, where there are a number of pre-existing GI services like Enlighten which developers are used to, and Lumen is very cool but it still has drawbacks that might deter developers from switching over.)

* Fortnite is out, unclear if it bothered to adapt to Lumen
* The First Descendant doesn't have a date, but it already had a public beta on PC (so people have already played this game at home.) I don't know if that uses Lumen though? It's a cross-gen UE5 project, so either it has its own GI solution or it falls back to other methods on past-gen devices.
* Layers of Fear has a Q1 2023 release date
* STALKER 2 would have already been out, but it got pushed back. I would guess they did not convert their lighting system to Lumen since they have been working on full production rather than engine work for all of UE5's availability (though they did show off experimentation with Nanite and maybe that migrated in without incident?)
* Mortal Rite is Q2
* Mortal Online 2 is upgrading to UE5 (this MMO is already out) but no answer on when to expect that
Click to expand...

I wouldn't use majority of those titles you listed as good UE5 examples.

Fortnite just got a slight upgrade and heavily relies on its cartoon art-style and looks quite identical as it did in UE4.
Layers of Fear I haven't seen so I can't speak about that.
Mortal Rite is done by unknown company I never heard of and based of the trailer it looks like a mobile game with horrendous environmental textures and models.
Mortal Online 2 is utter trash as well and never looked good back then and it won't look good now.

STALKER 2 is the only game that actually seems have the next-gen flair to it.
The First Descendant also looks quite good, but I still believe this engine can do way more than that in the right hands

Honestly, I wouldn't really truly judge anything until a developer who knows how to utilize the engine from head to toe to begin with and that developer is no other than The Coalition who are working on the next Gears game and another IP. Until Gears 6 comes out it will be hard to really see what UE5 is truly capable of. The Gears games always pushed the engine forward.

Silent Hill 2 looks good, but for the most part it's game with non-complicated geometry. Horror games usually heavily rely on the atmosphere and the lighting, so a showcase of Lumen will be very important in this specific case.

Here is another game that impressed me and believe it or not its only being worked on by 2 people in their SPARE time. Yes, 2.

 
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N

Neilg

Member
Elder Legend said:
May I see your ArtStation please? Always interested in seeing good art.
Click to expand...

sent via pm. but I mostly stick to my day job, there's not a lot to see!


to add to the discussion, anyone releasing a UE5 game now started in UE4 and ported to it. There's going to be a big difference in quality to games that started their initial concepting and design documents in UE5, vs what we see now in games that were ported to it. It does allow a totally new way of thinking, but people have barely considered the pros and cons yet, so even games going into development now are playing it safe and sticking with tried and true methods.
The Coalition are putting a lot of effort into trying to make the most of it, it will be exciting to see what they're able to come up with. Hopefully they have a great, passionate team on it who can set a standard for a while.
 
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GymWolf

GymWolf

Member
On-demand shader compilation is like asking the user if he want to do the thing before playing the game to avoid any type of stutter caused by that? or is it something for devs only?
 
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Elder Legend

Elder Legend

Yoir Aee Member
Neilg said:
sent via pm. but I mostly stick to my day job, there's not a lot to see!


to add to the discussion, anyone releasing a UE5 game now started in UE4 and ported to it. There's going to be a big difference in quality to games that started their initial concepting and design documents in UE5, vs what we see now in games that were ported to it. It does allow a totally new way of thinking, but people have barely considered the pros and cons yet, so even games going into development now are playing it safe and sticking with tried and true methods.
The Coalition are putting a lot of effort into trying to make the most of it, it will be exciting to see what they're able to come up with. Hopefully they have a great, passionate team on it who can set a standard for a while.
Click to expand...
Agreed.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Elder Legend said:
I wouldn't use majority of those titles you listed as good UE5 examples.
Click to expand...

You don't have to use them as "good" UE5 examples (I'm not super high on too many of them myself, and as I mentioned and also NeilG says, many are conversions or cautious first-run projects in UE5 which avoid some of the more experimental or unstable features.)

Nevertheless, they are being made in Unreal Engine 5. This is where professional developers making retail products are with the engine at this point and in early 2023 releases.

(Also, you asked, "I wonder what will be the first released game to utilize Lumen." You didn't ask what the "first released good game" would be. So nyaa-nyaa, asked and answered.)

Elder Legend said:
Honestly, I wouldn't really truly judge anything until a developer who knows how to utilize the engine from head to toe to begin with...
Click to expand...

Well, you already did judge right there in your post (Fortnite / Mortal Rite / First Descendant = bad UE5, Silent Hill 2 = medium UE5, STALKER 2 / Blight Survival / unknown Coaltion project = good UE5,) but for sure, the first wave of UE5 releases will be of varying quality and ambition and overall they will be tasters for what developers will do with this tech further down the line.

...I will say since you bring it up though, this idea that we're all waiting for the "real UE5 games" is a little bit dangerous in what it sets as expectations or understanding of what developers actually do when they develop. Everybody's waiting for this inflection point where games go from the next-gen we have now (which gamers complain endlessly about not being next-gen-enough compared to expectations...) and the next-gen we're supposedly going to get once cross-gen stops and everybody adopts to UE5 and the SSDs are pushed to their max and every great bulletpoint on a graphics card spec sheet gets utilized in-game... if you are holding your breath for this single day where everything jumps to next-gen lightspeed, you will suffocate. It will be a gradual rollout of features used and second-wave titles use more of the consoles and UE5 production ramps up / releases product to market.

There are already people out there complaining that Matrix Awakens is not next-gen enough (particularly because of its framerate struggles,) and when full-scale games come out using the same tech which went into Matrix Awakens, people will find ways to complain about what those games do too.

Us frogs will slowly cook in the slowly-boiling water of our forum complaints before we become aware of just how much progress has been made in our games.

I've been guilty of it myself, making a distinction between "real" UE5 projects and UE4 projects which converted. And certainly, there will be benefits in games which maximize UE5, so it's not that it's unreasonable to say this in conversation. But I've been scolded by actual developers for fair reason that 'development-is-development-is-development'. A developer using Unreal Engine 5 isn't a notation of status, it's just the choice of tool. Everybody with a PC can use UE5 freely, and also even experts can find reason not to jump to UE5 for their current or next project just because it's "one better!" A project can be made crappy in UE5, and many of the advanced functions of UE5 have been explored independently by 3rd Party plugin developers as well as internal studios customizing their UE project. The engine does not make the game, it enables the game to become what the designers are capable of making with that tool.

(For example, you yourself held up STALKER 2 as having "next-gen flair to it", despite the fact that it's absolutely a UE4 upconvert project and has been in showcases since before UE5 EA was made available to developers. It probably doesn't use Lumen, it might not use Nanite, but it's got next-gen flair to it because Unreal Engine was only the starting point.)
 
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lukilladog

lukilladog

Member
Nice, can't wait to be more impressed by other engines. Point being, these guys are so slow putting their stuff out there, Tale Plague Requiem and cyberpunk blow everything else out of the water.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Neilg said:
to add to the discussion, anyone releasing a UE5 game now started in UE4 and ported to it. There's going to be a big difference in quality to games that started their initial concepting and design documents in UE5, vs what we see now in games that were ported to it. It does allow a totally new way of thinking, but people have barely considered the pros and cons yet, so even games going into development now are playing it safe and sticking with tried and true methods.
Click to expand...

And it's not just a matter of what developers have considered yet as far as the pros and cons. (I'm glad you threw "cons" in there BTW, because there's not a lot of drawbacks but as magical as UE5 looks in demos, the reality of development is that Epic has improved its tools, not invented a magic machine.) Even if a genius had an idea already laid out, just waiting for what Lumen or Nanite brought to the table, there's still the matter of time. Games take several years, sometimes half a decade or worse, to make these days. UE5 was showed to the world in 2020, and even developers privately in the loop didn't have any access to it until late-2020/early 2021, with official Early Access hitting May 2021. (And even that was questionably stable enough for some full-scale productions to trust.)

The Coalition is one key UE developers outside of Epic, tasked with optimizing UE5 for Xbox Series consoles and experimenting with it to build the knowledge base for all of Xbox Games Studios, plus they worked on Matrix Awakens and of course have their own next project in the works... and even they didn't get UE5 access until November 2020. Even after Epic showed off UE5 to the public, The Coalition had to prototype its Alpha Point project and assets in UE4 until they could get a super-Early Access build.

...So I know gamers are grumbling, "Where are all the damned UE5 games?!" after seeing how cool demos like Lumen in the Land of Nanite were, but unfortunately the answer is that these UE5 games are all barely 24 months into production, at the very, very best. (Or they are converted UE4 projects, and they will be scrutinized for how "real UE5" they are.) Where they are is in the works. They are not done and not ready to play yet. They aren't here yet.
 
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CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
GymWolf said:
On-demand shader compilation is like asking the user if he want to do the thing before playing the game to avoid any type of stutter caused by that? or is it something for devs only?
Click to expand...

Yes and no.

ODSC itself is described in the release notes as primarily being a developer solution. (It's an important feature to get out to devs too, because while those stutters suck for gamers for a moment, shader compilations takes anywhere from several minutes to multiple hours to load a complex project from the editor, and that really, really, really sucks...)

However, that idea is on the table that shader speed and optimization of on-the-fly compiling is a priority issue to be squashed. UE5.1 moves shader compiling up in the process (where feasible) so that hopefully it's compiled before the object is actually seen in the game. There are also external tools working on optimizing shader compilation through various methods.

UE5.1 Release Notes said:
UE 5.1 aims to reduce stalls caused by shader compilation by starting to compile PSOs earlier, when components are loaded, rather than at the point where the object is rendered. This reduces or eliminates the need to manually gather PSO caches, which is a time-consuming process and cannot guarantee perfect coverage.

It is still possible to experience stalls if an object has to be rendered immediately after it's loaded. For the case of background streaming of distant objects, we've added the option to skip rendering the mesh until the PSO is ready, which trades stalls for delays in drawing these objects. Similarly, if a title needs to teleport the camera to a completely new location, or otherwise needs to display many new materials at once, there won't be enough time to compile all the PSOs. In this case, the game code needs to load the materials and meshes earlier, and hint the renderer ahead of time that it will need to draw them.

The existing PSO cache system can still work alongside the new system. It's possible to devise hybrid approaches, where there's a small, manually generated PSO cache containing materials which are known to be needed all the time, or are going to be used after a teleport event, and let the automatic system take care of most of the other materials.

This system is still under development and its performance will improve in future engine releases. It will also be expanded to support other RHIs, such as Vulkan.
Click to expand...
 
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Jet Set Willy

Jet Set Willy

Member
GymWolf said:
On-demand shader compilation is like asking the user if he want to do the thing before playing the game to avoid any type of stutter caused by that? or is it something for devs only?
Click to expand...
It's for devs only, relating to the Editor, not compiled games.

The bit that is relevant to shader compilation stutter in actual games, is the "DX12 PSO Compilation Improvements" I quoted above.

Edit: CamHostage CamHostage explains better above
 
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