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goopy20 on 21 May 2020
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Pemalite said:
goopy20 said:

Dude... Nanite and Lumen aren't just plus-plus-plus effects you can turn on or off. Lumen and Nanite are designed to work together and are specific features that require next gen hardware. You can't scale down Nanite because without the SSD, there is no Nanite.

Think of it like this. Lets say you're building a cross gen game then yes, you can use Unreal 5. However, you will still need to keep in mind that the ps4 doesn't have a SSD, meaning streaming 8k movie quality assets on the fly and rendering huge worlds with unlimited geometry is going to set the ps4 on fire. Therefore, you can't really use Nanite. Now if you're making a next gen exclusive with Unreal 5, its a different story. Nanite would then allow you to basically go crazy with the core level and world design, and do things not possible on current gen. 

Lumin can be "bolted on" to any game with relative ease and does NOT require Nanite to function or work "together".

Lumin is a hybrid lighting approach which leverages ray traced bounce lighting via voxels (Aka. SVOGI), temporal accumulation, signed distance fields and screen space to achieve the results it did.

Neither of these technologies rely on any individual hardware features in the next-gen consoles and are thus scalable downwards/upwards to other platforms (Performance not withstanding of course!)

Need more details on Nanite to really make the claim of "Unlimited Geometry". - We have heard such claims before remember.



Guess we will find out all those nitty gritties when I can finally play around with the Unreal 5 engine development tools.

Isn't the whole point of Nanite and Lumen to ease the burden on developers, allowing them do more in the time they have compared to current gen? From what I understand they're taking advantage of the SSD so you can import HQ assets like Zbrush sculptures directly into your game. This makes for much quicker and far more detailed world building, and Lumen is there to further cut development time by automatically lighting these crazy detailed environments. I'm sure you can also use Lumen for any game but it's main purpose is obviously to make things easier it in combination with Nanite.

On ps4, developers are far more limited by bandwidth and polygon budgets and need to use all kinds of "tricks" like baked lighting, LOD models etc. Not only is there no loss of quality on ps5, but more importantly, it would also take way more time and resources to have it run on ps4. That's why I'm guessing Nanite isn't supported on current gen as it would defeat its whole purpose. I mean, lets say you're making a multiplatform game and it takes 2 months to design a level on ps5, but having that same level run on ps4 takes 12 months because you have to do a lot of extra work on the scaling and programming side. What would be the point of using it? Next gen will be a lot less about raw horse power and a lot more about what developers can build in the fixed time frame and budget they're working with. 

Of course, Unreal 5 is a scalable engine and it will no doubt end up working even better on pc when newer SSD's hit the market, but Lumen and Nanite are definitely not designed to work on current gen consoles with a HDD. The demo was about one thing, and one thing only, to show off the new core features of the engine that were designed around the ps5's SSD tech. It's also compatible with Series X, of course, the only thing we don't know is what the difference in performance will be with half the SSD throughput, but a bit faster gpu. 

Last edited by goopy20 - on 21 May 2020