NVIDIA GameWorks Integration

[Alessiot89]

I'm not sure how viable VXGI will be honestly. The Apollo demo only ran at about 30FPS on my 970 so I can't imagine it running on anything lower without significant improvements.

Hopefully FleX doesn't have the same issues as VXGI.

Keep in mind that (true) "Global Illumination" is one of the two Dragons of Computer Graphics (the other is called "Ray Tracing", you can think about it as a big shiny - and evil - final boss of the Computer Graphics ; D).

Next close-to-metal APIs (true multi-threading, hurray!) with modern, and upcoming, GPUs rendering features ("volume tiled resources/volume sparse textures") will probably give Us (developers!) the weapons to defeat the first Dragon... and potentially those weapons could become the start point for approaching the final boss :P)

[PLL Hydra]

Hey guys just wanted to add to the chorus of excitement about these releases - really looking forward to all of the coming branches. Thanks for releasing this!

[Xerithas]

Also excited for this.
Don't suppose official GM200 reveal by the end of the month too =p

[Sephiroth_FF]

Thank you so much to nVIDIA for all the awesome GameWorks features being added to UE4. I know SLi is unrelated to GameWorks so, advanced apologies for going off topic but, I think this is the best place to ask for a nVIDIA feature since you are actively discussed here. Thus, could you add SLi support to your UE4 repo? It should technically not be feasible since so many feature relies on inter-frame dependency like Temporal AA, Motion Blur, etc. But, I was hoping you guys can ask how Zombie Studios/Builder Box Games pulled it off in their UE4 game Daylight. Anyhow, a good alternative would be to either allow VR SLi and 3D Vision SLi which, should not have too much compatibility issues or, you could allow the second GPU to only do the GameWorks computation which should, theoretically, be quite asynchronous to the render thread akin to the old days add-in PhysX card. Thank you

[Mike.Skolones]

Thank you so much to nVIDIA for all the awesome GameWorks features being added to UE4. I know SLi is unrelated to GameWorks so, advanced apologies for going off topic but, I think this is the best place to ask for a nVIDIA feature since you are actively discussed here. Thus, could you add SLi support to your UE4 repo? It should technically not be feasible since so many feature relies on inter-frame dependency like Temporal AA, Motion Blur, etc. But, I was hoping you guys can ask how Zombie Studios/Builder Box Games pulled it off in their UE4 game Daylight. Anyhow, a good alternative would be to either allow VR SLi and 3D Vision SLi which, should not have too much compatibility issues or, you could allow the second GPU to only do the GameWorks computation which should, theoretically, be quite asynchronous to the render thread akin to the old days add-in PhysX card. Thank you

I'll look into it. Must be possible somehow.
--Mike

[Mike.Skolones]

I'll look into it. Must be possible somehow.
--Mike

I asked some of the experts here at NV, and although it is certainly possible, there are a few reasons why it's not trivial.

The biggest problem seems to be that any integration we do will be fragile with respect to changes in the UE4 rendering code, which has been changing frequently and significantly over the months. If we take extra time and care with the integration we can minimize the effects of having the engine code change from underneath the feature, but a good measure of maintenance will still be required every time Epic pushes a new release. In time the UE4 code base will stabilize and SLI support will become more practical. A second issue is that running SLI optimally requires a driver profile specific to each game. We could get away with a UE4-specific profile for development purposes, where you would have to rename your executable to match the profile in order to test SLI; or you could use a generic profile by overriding the mechanism using the NVIDIA Control Panel, but your ability to tune the setup will be restricted. Then when you ship the game you would work out a custom profile with NV using your shipping game's .exe name.

We will look into scheduling the work, but we have quite a backlog of requests right now and I can't even guess at an ETA.

--Mike

[WinterLanternPro]

We're nearing the end of January. Im gettig really excited now!

[Mike.Skolones]

We're nearing the end of January. Im gettig really excited now!

Cool! Me too. I am confident that we will have the FleX branch up on Github next week. VXGI has a couple of last minute issues, the engineers are working through them; with any luck the end of next week will see VXGI up there too.

[iniside]

Cool! Me too. I am confident that we will have the FleX branch up on Github next week. VXGI has a couple of last minute issues, the engineers are working through them; with any luck the end of next week will see VXGI up there too.

It's like second chrismast!

[BrUnO XaVIeR]

Cool! Me too. I am confident that we will have the FleX branch up on Github next week.

[rubenst]

Cool! Me too. I am confident that we will have the FleX branch up on Github next week. VXGI has a couple of last minute issues, the engineers are working through them; with any luck the end of next week will see VXGI up there too.

Second and third Xmas! can't wait either to give it a try - Thank you very much for bringing this to the UE4 community!

[The_Inquisitive]

SnowWorks ?

I think it would be great and useful if GameWorks would be expanded to include deformable, interactive snow
- similar to BATMAN ARKHAM ORIGINS:

A dream would be similar like this LOL :

[DotCam]

That second video is pretty much just the FleX water solution modified to be thicker, stickier, and "clumpier" . I am nearly certain you can create something very similar using FleX. It is a rigid body particle based fluid simulation system, which uses small spheres to calculate volume and then render it as a liquid, I can easily see it being used for snow as well by thickening it:

The snow in Arkham Origins is just using a dynamic height map which is far less difficult to achieve, but cannot be used on landscape. In the game it is only rooftops or other small confined areas instead of being used everywhere. Here is the GDC presentation papers on it if you are interested: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020177...ring-in-Batman

[The_Inquisitive]

@DotCam - Ok, thanks very much for your help!

[DotCam]

@DotCam - Ok, thanks very much for your help!

No problem!

But wait for Mike to respond to this about using FleX for snow, I am almost positive it will work but he can confirm it for us.