When I was younger, graphics used to matter a lot for me. Now I just care about good gameplay and sometimes a good enough story

It's all brilliant until game developers create modern games that look like ass

Ratatouille now also apply to games: everybody can cook, but not everybody should cook (make games)

Art style > graphical fidelity Game play > graphical fidelity

Don't necessarily need photorealism, just good performance and art design, and of course good gameplay, preferably good UI. Lot of games lately lacking bits of it all.

But does it have 16 times the detail?

Just when you thought you had enough storage capacity Unreal Engine updates and tells us we're gonna need 16x the storage space that we literally just got done upgrading to.

I no longer care about companies improving graphics, I only care about companies improving gameplay and stories

Coming to a console near you in "cinematic" 30fps

I work IT for various game companies. They aren't using 5.4. If someone decides to start making a game TODAY, they might decide to use it, but the existing projects are moving forward with 3rd party character model and environment creation engines that AREN'T built in to UE5 because they've been around for longer. Also, this 5.4 release is TERRIBLE NEWS. Most of these companies are buying assets, but they're still using different methods of capturing humanoid movement. With these default pre-built options, we will continue to see the further sameification of games- they're all going to look the exact same.

"stutter struggle" is still real tho

If anything, this makes indie developers the ability to make amazing looking games without breaking the bank. Companies like EA will never change, but small studios that usually focus on a good game to play can now also have amazing AAA graphics as well. So it's mostly a good thing, with a mild bitter taste added. I'd love a BBC as well. It's a great idea. ;)

I spent 4 years at game development school and then another 2 years after working on small projects still learning as much as possible and what I came to realize is that the most important aspect of any game is its optimization and how smoothly it runs, no lag, small load times and immediate reactions in game which elevate any game to something that is polished and professional regardless how good the graphics are. It's so strange to me because game optimization is something they almost didn't even talk about at school and instead focused on more generic forms of game design. I'm never impressed anymore with game demos or trailers because I know that what they are showing isn't the game being played in real time, its always a pre rendered video with maxed out settings always trying to impress everyone with how incredible the graphics look, but all i want to see is how well the actual game plays because as a gamer I cannot stand loading screens and lag in games regardless how good the actual game looks. If a game runs badly it can also suggest that store bought assets are being used as their poly counts are very difficult to adjust as the polygons have been fractured resulting in a buggy laggy mess of a game.

I think the UE tools end up freeing up more time for developers to work on the gameplay instead of creating their own game engine from scratch. Developers are already well-versed in using the UE software so there is no time wasted learning a new set of tools of new custom game engine.

reminder that helldivers 2 works on an engine that's been discontinued like 7 years ago

There is not much need to go more "realistic" graphics wise. What we need is the realism and performance for the real time physics simulations. We are still using atleast over 20 years old technology for simulating physics in real time. That means that even the most powerful PCs have trouble simulating real cloth physics in real time. Example: You want wind affect your character hair, items, clothing and the gravity + uplift from the wings to affect the open cockpit plane flight simulation. What we need is that the plane stays in air because of the game engine physics are able to calculate the needed info (drag, resistance, gravity, speed, uplift and so on) while also simulating all possible moving parts in real time (hair, clothing, items, parts of the plane, particles and so on). What we have is fake non simulated flight and very limited physics for the simulation of the character/objects which are pre rendered mostly and still take hard toll on the performance. We need simple and powerful system to add collisions without them causing horrible amounts of data writing whenever objects collide. And simple way to make the objects react with each others. Example: Character is wearing a cape which collide with the body. If user adds pauldrons and chest item for the character, all they need to do is to add "collide with objects in group A" which includes almost every possible surface in the game. When they tab that feature then the new items collide correctly with the cape. If user adds hair and backpack then the cape again will collide correctly with those items in real time. Currently that would cause massive amounts of data taking all the memory and power from the users computer. We need "nanite" for the physics.

So what that the game will have "next gen graphics" if my eyes will be glued to the mini map/compas because the game world is just overflowing with shit but without any substance

7:24 Your correct in Unreal 5.5 they are going to introduce Nanite Skeletal Meshes. (For characters with bones.) Which is already in the Unreal 5.5 beta. So far it's a straight 2x performance improvement over normal skeletal meshes. And it's still the early experimental version.

They're still not fixing the shader compilation issues and traversal stutters though..

Remember when they first showed off unreal 5 and told us there was this amazing technology that would make it to where great graphics would be so much less taxing on your pc. Still waiting on that.

Been in a game design course for the last 2 years, using UE5.2 both in group projects and my own, would have been nice to have some of this stuff earlier as I did see people struggle on character animation and rigging the most. I'm only 2 mins into the vid so will probably have to edit this comment, however, the chatter that said that you would need a 'nasa computer' is imo completely wrong, im not totally sure about other peoples' experience, but the course I took, we had access to computers with 32gb ram, 4050s in one of the rooms we were in and 3080s in my first year, don't really remember the cpus but they were like 13th gen intel cpus. Don't get me wrong these pcs are great and the 3080s were bought in the middle of the gpu price spike / shortage back in covid iirc, I myself have a 7600x, a 4070 and 32gb of ram, now don't get me wrong what I listed are absolutely great parts but nothing insanely high end that'll literally cost an arm and a leg like a 4090 lol, not to mention that in engine what youre working on runs worse, tho I've personally had 0 issues, anyway yapping over.

With how rapidly they are pushing out new versions of Unreal engine I suspect they are making a game in the background. Really hoping for the next chapter of 'Unreal'.

"All I care about is story and game play, not graphics". For anything other than small studios, these three things are in separate development pipelines. They don't affect each other.

The control rig stuff is great, one thing they don't cover but should cover in this video is the mutable plugin. Mutable is gonna let me hopefully be able to make a huge more variety of characters in game as well as player customization with less effort. I've really been looking forward to a lot of this stuff.

The Day Before's Devs will always think about the day before they decided to release their game at it's current status!

It is also developed for "The Volume" filming environment, as used on The Mandolorian, and Star Trek : Strange New Worlds.

I was already happy that they've fixed those damn shadows on the Orthographic camera, been waiting for that since UE4, now i can finally go back to some projects i had

I worked with 3DS4 in 1995 up to 3DSMax till around 2006 (render time 8h on a Athlon64 3800+ for ONE picture with V-Ray) - I had never thought we will get here so quickly... But then Epic = Demoscene, like Remedy and DICE, who else if not them.

Blur everything around your character view and fuckin upscale from 480p image .. future of gaming :D cannot wait

All that achievements in graphics but once the end boss is triggered he makes his scripted move even if you don't stand in front of him.

cant wait to see all these amazing graphics and features in all my new AAAAAAAAA games in 2081 now we dont even have proper current gen games, most of them are still realeasing on past gen consoles or looks like they can work on past gen just fine

Can manage a low end that will play mid to high end games on low/medium settings for around $600-800, a high end business dell(dell is just one of the more common and cheap, HP might also work) that's being recycled plus budget for a dedicated graphics card. If you're looking you can find an older machine for cheap. Ram, and cpu will be slower, but it'll house, and support newer graphic cards. Its a decent foot in the door, they can go for anywhere between $100-600 but I'd stay looking around the $400 range. Usually gets 32gb ram, 1tb ssd, and an I7, I'd just double check you aren't getting shafted paying 10th gen pricing, for a 4th gen machine. If StarForge wanted to go down the route of useable machines for around $1000, not sure whom to ask, but I'd try to get some partnerships, or contracts will dell, or electronic recycling factories that repurpose older machines.

don't worry about making VR games, we can just use UEVR to automatically get full VR

Refining all the software to run on lower end tech is the real challenge.

Since we r reaching the physical limitation on hardware size, until a major breakthrough, optimization on the the way the computer reads and reproduce the graphs is our best near future

Unreal Engine 5 is INCREDIBLY heavy to run, dont overstate the 'optimization' of it. it can do some awesome stuff with nanite and lumen, but you pay alot in gpu overhead for those features. (depending on implementation)

I'm going to have to upgrade my pc to be able to run unreal 5.... one free asset underground cave was enough to stutter and crash my system to desktop. Unreal is an amazing tool, but gotta have the hardware to run it. Time to save up my cash while i plot out my game designs. 😅

Storage UN5:😮 Storage UN6:☠️

I'm honestly more excited to see some LLM AI implementation in games over the next few years. We're talking about things like NPC dialogues and interactions. Imagine you feed an LLM the game's story and extensive lore of the default world-state. NPCs can then interact with you in a much more realistic manner, comparing the current world-state to the default, and comment on things you've done in game in real-time.

Yeah somethings going to have to happen with PC's this last gen was just more power MORE power so much so that some parts are a fire hazard now, and upper midrange CPU's need coolers that extreme overclockers used to use.

Graphics are great and all but this is why I like jrpgs so much nowadays and indie games because it feels like they focus on the story they’re trying to tell or trying to make a good game without being carried by the graphics

Performance is more important to me than graphics. If you game isn't hitting at least 60, I don't even care about it.

I have always loved seeing that UE logo at the start of a game. Have been a huge fan of how the games have looked/performed.

One thing you rarelly see mentioned is that tech like DLSS significantly increases input lag, something in didn't have with old games. Even with Reflex you still get some. The argument that games will run on any device doesn't really apply, just look at Alan Wake 2.

I keep seeing these cool graphics in demos. Where are the games already?

graphics are cool but I would prefer it if they made a good game first

Insanely impressive visulas so far, but it's still just a bunch of hard materials like rocks and metal. I don't think their engine can render things like foliage quite yet, hence why they only showcase these barren environments. Once they achieve that though it's going to be craaaazy

I think hes not wrong. As a matter of fact it's the same with monitors and resolutions. We are continuously reaching a point in resolution, graphics and physics simulations, where all the steps ahead will have certainly higher levels of "realism and quality", but it will be increasingly harder to notice significant changes, the consumer will see as valuable additions to the product. I mean we have seen what modder's can do to cyberpunk 2077... So I think game development will increasingly shift towards ray tracing and similar technologies sure, but it will also drastically shift towards more realistic physics and AI. So I'm not so optimistic about PC's getting smaller and cheaper - although it has to happen, because it's really getting out of hand. But, what good is a character in a game, that you almost can't visually distinguish from a real person, if it still can't interact naturally with its environment, or even worse, reacts like an NPC from Skyrim to the player? So I think it will steadily shift in those directions, redirecting the increasing performance away from graphics alone, as they did in the past. Unfortunately that still doesn't fix bad quests and game play mechanics or a bland story.

Setting up a leg IN A FEW STEPS! GET IT?!?!

All this to make crappy 45+ hour long boring AAA campaigns with little to no storytelling.

In the past art direction was limited by graphics technology. But nowadays if a studio wants a photorealistic look it can go for it. And so in a way graphic improvements reached a meaning plateau, in which it is still improving but with diminishing returns to the audience. Meanwhile you have indie games, cartoonish 3D games that do just as well without the photorealism. It is a tool in art direction.

I visited Abertay University last week and spoke to some devs in person (Dundee, Scotland, the home of DMA Design, Lemmings, Rockstar North) One was really excited for 5.4. One was skeptical. Frame rates are the problem. 5.4 promises to fix this but devs have to implement it correctly or it will still be bad. They also have an Nvidia Blackwell machine there. Absolutely incredible to see. The guy I was talking to, Alessandro, says it cost £100K lol. So UE5.4 will run well on that at least. Oh, and we around 5 years away from seeing the benefits of 5.4

Doesn't matter if it looks good. If the game is 100 usd, has tons of microtransactions and has deluxe, ultimate, insert x tier version that doesn't even make sense, it's still s***.

some chinese animators use Unreal Engine for their anime and they're really good

As long as you have enough frames and decent shadows.. I'm down to appreciate and play in the environment without stuttery, shiny textures, if not optimized even.

To the people saying they don't care about graphics improvements in the comments, UE 5.4 is adding functional tools not graphics improvements. I'll list off the actual features and what they do to empower developers to simplify it for you guys. Motion Matching - Smoother animation blending, for example backwards and forwards are different 'assets' and we blend them together in the engine to make our player character 'animate' however this was the old way of doing things. Now we can simply supply a file with all of our animation assets and it will blend the most logical ones. Ultimately this will save time when creating functional animation systems and in the long run your animations will look smoother. Look at the recent Fortnite movement rework as an example, it had a rocky start due to the animations themselves not being liked but after fixes players now love the new movement locomotion. Animation Tools - Animation tools always existed in-engine but they were kind of janky, this update fleshes it out meaning if you need to make small animations or quick adjustments to animations you can do it in-engine instead of in a 3rd party app like Maya or Blender, which again massively saves development time and costs(annual Maya licenses cost over 2k LMAO) Easier Rigging Tools - Basically they made rigging a character(skeleton) as simple as snapping a lego minifgure together with preset pieces, this is going to massively boost development time. Nanite Tessellation - Nanite which itself is a game changer that basically means assets and models don't have to worry about polygon limits - Polygons are how 3D games are rendered, everything you see in a game is made up of Triangles. More triangles = more resources need to render, basically it came down to developers optimizing their assets and making sure they did not exceed polygon budgets. Now with Nanite Its less of an issue and gives games a lot performance back in high cost scenes/levels. (basically we cant expect to see more ambitious games soon as nanite gets added to more areas of the engine, think like 200v200 battlefield style games) - Tessellation is a way of saying "more detail on simple assets with less resources needed" (so improved performance and visuals basically) So with the new Nanite Tessellation we can add lots of detail to our level without a big cost on system resources, for example we can create a snow effect that is extremally performant as seen in the Marvel Captain America game in the release notes video. These are some of the main features displayed in the video, but the update includes so much more to increase production speeds across the board, which means you should see changes faster that still look as good. Now I will state the tools and engine are only as good as the developers and studios that use them. The developers create the bugs and unoptimized gameplay, that will always be a thing. Also on Asmongolds point that we have almost peaked in graphical fidelity, he's dead on and now its about making the tools we have optimized to run better. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, I hope I shared something that might help you understand game dev a little better!

Seeing how impressed he is with the latest graphics maybe asmon can upgrade to a quality hd webcam someday instead of just sticking with the 480p walmart cam he found in a box labeled "free" on the side of the road ten years ago...

Cloud gaming unfortunately is limited by latency, involving ping and literally the speed of light. OnLive tried it in the 2000s, Stadia in the 2010s, and they have learned the same lesson: the latency is just too much for most people. If Google can't make it work, i don't see anyone making it working.

consumer PCs right now are vastly more powerful than what we used to refer to as "NASA PCs" back when that comparison actually made sense. The things we can do with current hardware is incredible, but with so much power, it allows for laziness, less urge for clever problem solving and optimization because the hardware just runs it decently enough, even if it's not nearly as smooth as it *could* be.

it is great that the tools gets better, it is easier and thus cheaper to create games, but still we need more tools for easier optimisation because this gets left out sadly

Combine this with that Ai girlfriend demo and then make it all fast enough to reduce input voice latency to almost zero and there ya go, haha.

sick cant wait for whats in store for the future of gaming

tbh even if bitrate would be great and delay would be at a minimum i will always prefer rendering my games natively on my pc rather than streaming them. not to mention running them natively has the advantage of mods

I agree with Asmon here, but for the prices: 4000 euro = 4090, if you need a good case or want the best parts you prob pay 4.5 or even 5K. 3.300-3.500= 7900XTX or 4080 super. 2500 = 3080. Below 2300 euro you basically can't get an actual good gaming pc that isn't 2nd hand. If you get better than that for those prices you get a really good deal pc's are expensive it is what it is.

I thought Asmon and friends "don't give a F* about Graphics"

Damn, this engine looks Unre-

People missing the point. The powerful tools and advanced adaptability is now available to the home user not just the multi-billion $ company. Small indie projects no longer need hugely expensive hardware and eternally long development time, making profitability more likely. The issue we have had is large publishers controlling prices and schedules, this sort of advance removes some of that.

The 4090 PCB is small. It's cooler is so big to be able to cool 450-600wats of drawn power. Place a water block and it's a small factor card now.

it's a shame unreal engine is a shinier unity engine and everything in it still bombs. Physics and interactions never look good or convincing. It's just 20 billion polygons of paint cans on unreal engine 3.

Graphics peaked at the PS3.

I use UE5 for film production, my computer cost around $2,300 for me to run Unreal Flawlessly and thats only with a 4070 ti. But you dont need a top of the line machine to run the engine or make something good looking. Incredible tool, takes time to learn but it's all worth it in the end

My main problem with most games i've played that were made in UE5 recently is that they have CRAZY performance problems ( usually heavy stutters ), if they fix that i will be glad

Brother. The game engine doesn’t give the ”graphics” but rather can help it to be implemented in a more painless way. Ofc Nanite and custom shader stuff but Nanite is for polygon count and custom shaders can be achieved in any other software too. They just try to make it for artists to set things up more user friendly.

So far I've done various amounts of rigging in Unreal, Blender, and Maya. I like Maya the best overall just because I like the workflow of using curves for the control rig. Unreal was my least favorite, because the experience felt clunky in comparison to the other two.

To be honest, graphics are perfectly fine nowadays. What are very lacking are art direction, storylines, gameplay loop, and character design. Just because a game has too real like graphics does not mean instant immersion. Also, the requirement of loading UE games is too much these days.

UE5 is a masterpiece of the decade that every gamer and developer has yearned for, because achieving the simplicity of creating anything in it, being user friendly, outputting amazing graphics with easy rendering solutions, achieving great working quality, and doesn't it just works. So much problems have been answered with this tool. Because of this developers shouldn't be slacking off and be able to create bigger games in size, higher visual quality games, but should invest more into writing, storytelling, and gameplay. There should be a remaster of ME trilogy with UE5, because writing and all of that is right there, now lets update the visuals for it. Meanwhile for new games, the graphics are now easy to achieve, lets focus on writing and gameplay. Todays AI can potentially help a lot already regards to coding, train it for the UE5 and you should be able to fix mistakes within your codes with the help of AI for the required tasks. I mean, the focus literally should be towards those two things right now - writing/storytelling and gameplay. About PC gaming. I did a ground up build back in 2018 for 1,5k Euro's excluding monitor and peripherals. Cost included the back then newly released Ryzen 3700X, RTX 2700 Super, DDR4 32GB (2x 16) RAM, 850W PSU, and a new case with new case fans separately. Later upgraded CPU cooler to liquid cooler, but I think that one is not entirely necessary if we're talking about mid-high end PC that actually can play a lot of current games well on high. It struggles with Cyberpunk, but you can manage options since a lot of graphical settings are very unnecessary since the change is either invisible or barely visible, which is still only in some scenes. I think nowadays you can still get similar type of PC for the same amount if not +/- 100 Eur. 2k is not necessary unless you go for the nVidia's 80 or 90 models that actually bring you to those costs. But, I have to say that I got some money back by selling my old PC afterwards, which means that I spent around 1,2k Euros on my PC, since I sold for 300-something.

I never look at fidelity when I comment on the look of a game, I look at atmosphere, and the principles of design and color. If the composition of the frame, the cinematography, the choices of color etc. all create a unified whole then it'll be great art even if it's make on old graphics. New graphics can support that but it's no replacement for artistic principles.

I sell 4080 Supers for 1k USD, 1550 Dollary Doos. A 4080 Super is overkill for the top tier. The GTX series still runs most games on Ultra. A 1080 is like 100 - 300 bucks.

problem is that 1st most of the Devs/Publishers aren't using it yet and those who are using it are using it the wrong way by focusing on Visuals than making the game faster with better performance

The graphical jump in games over the next 3-5 years is going to be insane.

ControlRig may be sufficient for Game developer, but more polishing is needed for pure animation purpose.

The best rendering I have seen lately isn't even out of Unreal, Remedy Games with their Northlight Engine.

Artstyle > Graphics. That's why arkham city still looks amazing 13 years later

20 years ago, great graphics were the hallmark of a developer who really put effort in the game, and even if the game had some problems, the graphics quality could cover for it. Today, graphics tech is so advanced and easy to use that people can easily see the flaws in other areas because they can't be wowed by the visuals.

Greyzone looks great but truly its so easy to make that games map in unreal 5 with all the foliage and everything.

1:47 for reference, this is the same movement software that naughty dawg used to develop last of us 2. Looks amazing

We are approaching photoreal graphics but there are a lot more places that need improvement and innovation that all play into the visual and functional aspect of games. Like physics simulations, terrain deformation with voxels or other methods, animation AI, and behaviour AI. We've reached the peak when a full world simulation like the matrix is possible. Right now we're not even close to that.

I still get impressed when great graphics are combined with great set pieces, like the kind you find in tomb raider or uncharted

You'll have to get the reverse black logo of starforge on that BBC

Big head Luffy looks like Ivankov for me, they even have same crazy energy

A lot of business already do what he's talking about with virtual desktops. They essentially just have a shell of a PC that the VM (virtual machine) Server processes & renders down to the terminal.

Mobile games today have the quality of a PS4 and run at 60 fps, which is just insane to think that your phone can do that. Performance improvements are happening so quickly, it won't be long until we have photorealism on mobile too.

Ideally, this should reduce the time needed to be dedicated on graphics considering how quick it is to generate models etc, and increase the time dedicated to storyboarding and gameplay. Here's hoping.

Now they gotta work on improving Blueprints systems some more. More powerful, more versatile, easier to use, and faster to run.

It's great, but you'll only see the different during those 2 minute cutscenes then it's back to 20fps gameplay

While I agree pc gaming is expensive to get into with all brand new parts, but on the used market you can get a next gen console equivalent for less than the next gen console. The high price is for the convenience of not building the pc yourself. A few UKposts vids and a can do attitude can save you a few (insert local currency here)

I have no problem playing quake live but I really adore beautiful graphics. Seeing games like black desert online and warframe with really pretty graphics is awesome assuming the game is good. It's really wonderful to see the technology improve and I hope it inspires creative minds that might not have otherwise gotten into game dev to get into it.

5:50 Its not just focus. Its COMPENSATION for the real camera you are using to shoot a scene where you PROJECT the unreal 3D ambient on a screen behind the actor. It makes it look right under the circumstances you want it to (viewed from the real camera, not on your monitor)

No, we are FAR from photo-realism, and even RTX Raytracing is (by default, for all games) faking a lot of things in favor of better performance. Where ever we can just do screenspace-reflections instead, we usually just do that, even if it looks much less realistic. Raytracing is still almost only used for ambient-light (rarely for spot-lights or clouds,) where it is most subtle and requires the least change-of-level-design (because some areas just become too dark). Raytracing heavily depends on temporal-reprojection, making it add a LOT of terrible motion-blur. And even there it is pretty much "once you go realtime-raytracing, you never go back". The Beymax movie pioneered in sub-surface-lights, a tricky and important thing for realism, but it almost never calculates more than 11 bounces, where you can tell a difference between 10 and 20 subsurface-bounces.

I really wish Epic would invest more into teaching people how to use all of this. Ne and some friends got into unreal engine and man.. its been a frustrating ride so far. Every course or tutorial just goes over the same basic stuff and the moment you try to dig in deeper you get lost in a void of depression. Not a single tutorial is trying to explain it in a way that you could actually grasp the "why" behind certain decisions and actions. But hey, maybe one day me and my friends can be the guys who teach haha.