NVIDIA GameWorks Integration

[Errvald]

So I played quite a bit with WaveWorks today so far I'm very pleased with it and it's apparently just one node you add in your water material and it generates foam, normal and displacement!

For those interested I uploaded a video showing what I ended up with after a couple of hours in the material editor (should be in 60fps if you use Chrome).

Now the question is, are the buoyancy physics implemented? is there an easy way I can add buoyancy to a mesh in C++ or get the Z (height) data? or that feature still needs work to properly work in UE4?

Looks a lot different from their official video though.

[order66]

So I played quite a bit with WaveWorks today so far I'm very pleased with it and it's apparently just one node you add in your water material and it generates foam, normal and displacement!

For those interested I uploaded a video showing what I ended up with after a couple of hours in the material editor (should be in 60fps if you use Chrome).

Now the question is, are the buoyancy physics implemented? is there an easy way I can add buoyancy to a mesh in C++ or get the Z (height) data? or that feature still needs work to properly work in UE4?

Looks pretty nice!

Do you mind sharing your material setup?

[DotCam]

Looks a lot different from their official video though.

What Mike provided was a quick example setup showing how to use WaveWorks, with the video you linked showing what it is capable of. Mike has mentioned already they will be putting together a full sample including ships & bouyancy etc soon, but you can already get the same look with a more advanced material (the one that comes with the demo is a very basic material).

It is a really cool sample, you should try it out!

[Terrian]

Can someone briefed on the issue tell me which parts of Nvidia's GameWorks have DXC implementations (i.e. not Cuda-only)?

I've been very impressed by EPIC's push for a GPU vendor independency of UE4 (especially with more complex rendering and simulation stuff like GPU particles coming to the party) and anything that detracts from that is a step back IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's always good to have options for those who seek them, but in a form of plugins and third party codebases.

I hope that anything CUDA related stays away from any deeper UE4 integration.

[TK-Master]

Looks a lot different from their official video though.

Well that's because the ocean shader used in the video would need to be re-created in UE4 (currently it includes only a super basic example material setup and no ocean plane, which I had to make) I'm sure that someone with experience could easily make it look like that video, and even better.
Also this is early in the works, all I did was play with some colors and adjust the post process effects really

The point is, you just plug WaveWorks to your material and you have awesome realistic wave displacement which has parameters you can adjust (like wind speed etc.) but the rest of the material doesn't really need to be done by WaveWorks..
WaveWorks makes the simulation, you define the look.

Looks pretty nice!

Do you mind sharing your material setup?

Sure why not! here is the modified project files..
You will need the UE4 branch with WaveWorks posted by Mike.Skolones for it to work.
TestProject.rar

The buoyancy physics is not yet implemented in UE4, but it should be straightforward to get the height data and calculate the intersection of the height field with, for example, a convex hull. When we get some extra time I hope to publish a boat sample using a PhysX rigid body for the boat hull, and a pawn controller that applies buoyancy, drag, propulsion, etc., similar to how the vehicle sample uses a pawn to create a PxVehicle.

Sounds good I would love to see a boat demo project!

[DotCam]

Can someone briefed on the issue tell me which parts of Nvidia's GameWorks have DXC implementations (i.e. not Cuda-only)?

I've been very impressed by EPIC's push for a GPU vendor independency of UE4 (especially with more complex rendering and simulation stuff like GPU particles coming to the party) and anything that detracts from that is a step back IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's always good to have options for those who seek them, but in a form of plugins and third party codebases.

I hope that anything CUDA related stays away from any deeper UE4 integration.

This is the main reason why it is being integrated into a separate branch of UE4 provided by NVIDIA. Before any of this can be integrated into the engine released by Epic, it will need to either work on both GPU's or use the CPU instead. Just wanted to clarify this is not an official integration (at least not yet).

Mike has mentioned they are working on alternate implementations of most of the features, but there is no news yet on how long that will take. I see no problem with them integrating 2 versions into UE4, one that uses an alternate method, and another that can be used with CUDA. It would be great if both versions were GPU based, but I am not sure if that will be possible.

That's as much as I know at this point, Mike will be able to answer in further detail though, so keep an eye out for that.

[John Alcatraz]

I could be wrong, but I guess if nvidia would want to they could implement everything which works in CUDA also in opencl. They just use CUDA because of better marketing against AMD.

[Mike.Skolones]

I could be wrong, but I guess if nvidia would want to they could implement everything which works in CUDA also in opencl. They just use CUDA because of better marketing against AMD.

WaveWorks started out in CUDA because we used the FFT algorithms developed by our High Performance Computing group, sort of an experiment in taking code developed for scientific research into the games space. Having evaluated the potential of both DXC and OpenCL as alternatives, we are working on a DXC version of WaveWorks because we believe it will be easier to develop, optimize and maintain in DXC than in OpenCL. For our internal teams CUDA offers some real advantages over DXC, because the developers can suggest to the CUDA team that specific features or optimizations should be implemented in the CUDA layer to take better advantage of NV GPU architecture; sometimes these tweaks are not so easily replicated in DXC, so it makes sense for us to figure out the 'speed of light' using CUDA before delving too deeply into a DXC port.

[John Alcatraz]

Sounds reasonable, but what is this "DXC"? Google told me it means "DXCompute" and it seems to be an alternative to CUDA and OpenCL but DXC is only mentioned in context with Nvidia. So is DXC developed by Nvidia? Why is it so hard to find information about DXC? Why do all (or most) programs use either CUDA or OpenCL (or both), but not DXC? Is DXC same "open" als OpenCL and does DXG also runs great on AMD GPUs (same performance as on equal Nvidia GPUs)?

[Mike.Skolones]

Yes, perhaps I should call it 'Direct Compute',or "DC". I don't know, I've heard it several ways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectCompute

DirectCompute is a more recent arrival than CUDA or OpenCL, appearing in DX10 and DX11, so games with earlier DX versions may have used CUDA or OpenCL for GPU computing. DirectCompute is not 'developed by NVIDIA', it is a Microsoft technology supported by NVIDIA through the GeForce driver system.

https://developer.nvidia.com/directcompute

[John Alcatraz]

So it only works on Windows... That's sad, since UE4 does a great job in supporting other platforms. And gameplay depending features should work on all platforms the same way.

[Mike.Skolones]

So it only works on Windows... That's sad, since UE4 does a great job in supporting other platforms. And gameplay depending features should work on all platforms the same way.

CUDA is supported on OSX and Linux as well, and we are working on CUDA for Android too. XBoxOne supports DC, but PS4 has its own system as far as I know.

Although it is certainly feasible over the long term that all core features will work the same way on all platforms, at any given time some platforms will have greater capabilities than others. You can't expect the same features and performance from a mobile chip or from last year's console as from a latest generation enthusiast-quality PC. Demanding the same content on all platforms means settling for less on platforms of greater capability. An alternative is to have core gameplay elements in common across platforms, but scale the effects to suit the platform.

[John Alcatraz]

with "other platforms" I thought about Linux and Mac CUDA will only run on Nvidia and DXC will only run on Windows... So AMD Users on Linux and Mac are the one that are missing support. I dont care about consoles and mobile
With OpenCL you could enable support for all platforms.

[Errvald]

Windows is the biggest market though, that's more than enough for any Indie.

[Alessiot89]

I still dream about an open source turning point of NVIDIA Gameworks...