Tim Sweeney: evaluation

Transcript context

…Exactly, and in graphics, it’s been even more so. It’s something like literally 10 million times more net usable GPU performance than we had back running on a Pentium 90 CPU all in 30 years. It’s really made me appreciate that over the generations, some areas of our engine development have absolutely kept up with that technology, and the rendering team that works on Unreal Engine are the real miracle workers there. Just about every generation of Unreal, we’ve replaced most of the rendering code and the different leaders in different points and times, and the different luminaries have built systems that were absolutely rethought and optimized for the latest generation of hardware. Unreal Engine One was built for software rendering and then the Voodoo One came along late in the cycle and we had support for it, but it wasn’t fully capable and utilized. Unreal Engine Two was about bringing all of the latest GPU hardware acceleration features to the engine and keeping forward and building some new features like vehicles and a few other capabilities. All this was in the early GPU era before GPUs had really broken out of everybody’s expectations and more That breakout occurred with DirectX Nine and the capabilities of programmable shaders. Once you had control of writing code, running on the GPU that could color every pixel on the screen, and that GPU code was literally a factor of 100 times faster than the equivalent code I wrote a few years earlier on the Pentium 90. DirectX Nine Generation was a godsend, and Andrew Scheidecker longtime Epic Luminary wrote the core of the Unreal Engine Three render around real-time pixel shading, real-time lighting, being able to do dynamic shadows using several different techniques and multi-thread the render to support bits of the early dual core CPUs that were starting to show up at the time. It was a massive, massive graphical upgrade. Unreal Engine Four, made a number of improvements and just continued to add features to make more and more give artists more and more options for lighting and for geometry that created realism. grade. Unreal Engine Four, made a number of improvements and just continued to add features to make more and more give artists more and more options for lighting and for geometry that created realism. Then I think probably our biggest single level of a leap came with Unreal Engine Five with a Nanite Micropolygon geometry solution and with Lumen Global Illumination Lighting Solution, which I think really bridged the gap from game-ish computer graphics to total observable photorealism for artists who wanted to create that. That’s been the evolution and the progress on the graphics side is absolutely astonishing as it is on the audio side in a number of other areas. Parts of the engine also, haven’t changed all that much since the version I wrote and shipped in 1998. The file management system has been optimized a number of times, but it hasn’t been completely rethought. The networking system, the ways that clients and servers talk together and negotiate game State is still an evolution of the thing I wrote and it’s feeling kind of dated now. You still see networking bugs in Fortnite where for some reason when you’re spectating, you’re not seeing some parameters update. Well, that’s because of the lossful nature of that networking model. The biggest limitation that’s built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we’re using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded programming. We didn’t want to burden either ourselves or our partners or the community with the complications of multi-threading. Over time that becomes an increasing limitation. We’re really thinking about and working on the next generation of technology and being on Unreal Engine Six. That’s the generation we’re actually going to address a number of the really core limitations that have been with us over the history of Unreal Engine and get those on a better foundation that the modern world deserves, given everything that’s been learned in the field of computing in that timeframe. That’s a terrifyingly challenging engineering problem. It seems like every version of Unreal Engine, the amazing teams behind it are willing to just throw away most of the code, or maybe I’m being a little bit too dramatic, but basically throw away the old approaches, like you mentioned with Carmack and start again, like with Nanite and Lumen, just keep optimizing to the current hardware, but even rethinking how it’s all done going from single-threaded to multi-threaded. Oh boy, that’s terrifying. That’s in part, we’ll talk about it, why maybe you have to rethink even the programming language that’s being used to rethink a lot of things. That’s fascinating. Can we just stick on Unreal Engine Five? I watched a bunch of stuff, but the state of Unreal in GDC 2024. I was just giggling with excitement watching some of this stuff. If we can talk about different things here just to nerd out a little bit. People should go watch this video. They talked about the dirt. The ultra-realistic, and this is for Marvel 1943, which is kind of putting the Marvel universe into Nazi-occupied France in the winter. There’s snow, and that’s a moment in history. That’s a very intense moment in history, and it really creates a feeling and puts you there. There’s so much to that, including the snow. Just looking at the dirt is a really nice way to show how do you add a lot of details to the scene in real time that gives this experience infinite detail? This is real, this is super real. Then I think in the talk they describe what’s entailed in the generation of the geometry, what’s entailed in the lighting, all that kind of stuff. Maybe can you speak about dirt? What are the components for people who might not know in creating this ultra-realistic, the texture, the lighting, the geometry, all of that, how Nanite, how Lumen all come together in this beautiful orchestra to paint in real time, the dirt in Nazi-occupied France in 1943?…

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