How does UE4 stack up against CryEngine 5's rendering capabilities

[Deathrey (DeathreyCG)]

@mariomguy;610845

Yeah, lowering the steps by pixel depth is actually more expensive than doing it by falloff.

And POM does not give you accurate lighting with material functions functions are mapped to the vertices, not the offset.

There is some heavy pseudo-scientific stuff going on in the quotes above. I have no idea what are you talking about.

Really? The fact that I ran the same project on a $11,000 development build with a GTX 690 and my personal computer with a GTX 960 ($1,000 to $230) and saw 2X performance improvement is not enough for you?

That is not a fact. That is a rumor. Besides,I have zero interest in your hardware specs and its performance in your projects. I absolutely agree on 1060 performing better overall than 780.

What I don’t agree with and whole reasoning of me chiming in here here is this post.
Namely:

How in the hell can you consider landscapes a constraint?! Grass is proceduraly generated on this landscape based off of vertex painting of the grass surface. Each vertex takes information about the surface type, and it blends physical properties as well as visual heightblends for the materials. My character will make a different sound, leave behind a different footprint, and create a different dust effect for each surface type. The second screenshot shows parallax occlusion on the sand, basic normal mapping on the dirt, and a simple texture/foliage for the grass, as well as rocks with world-space blending in the background (Try coding that in HLSL without the material editor’s help by yourself). Also, the landscape removes unused surfaces per component, and with DX-12 you can easily have thousands upon thousands of draw calls per frame. And if you’re not happy with landscape’s astounding resolution, you can use tessellation to make the landscape infinitely detailed and use texture displacement maps to physically bump geometric detail (Tessellation was actually CHEAPER than parallax occlusion mapping in an underwater scene for a client, so yes, not only can you have tessellation in your final deliverable, but it is actually the preferred method!)

Step by Step:

How in the hell can you consider landscapes a constraint?!

Heightfield rendering is recognized weak spot in UE4, both in terms of performance and functionality. Votes on aswerhub feature requests and issue tracker support that. This is objective. You like landscapes in UE4. That is subjective.

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Grass is procedurally generated on this landscape based off of vertex painting of the grass surface. Each vertex takes information about the surface type, and it blends physical properties as well as visual heightblends for the materials.

Does CryEngine function somewhat worse in this respect? No.

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My character will make a different sound, leave behind a different footprint, and create a different dust effect for each surface type.

Does CryEngine function somewhat worse in this respect? No.

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The second screenshot shows parallax occlusion on the sand, basic normal mapping on the dirt, and a simple texture/foliage for the grass, as well as rocks with world-space blending in the background (Try coding that in HLSL without the material editor’s help by yourself).

Does CryEngine function somewhat worse in this respect? No. It is available out of the box, even without touching any kind material editors. Doing that in HLSL yields considerably better performance even in UE4 btw.

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Also, the landscape removes unused surfaces per component, and with DX-12 you can easily have thousands upon thousands of draw calls per frame.

Does CryEngine function somewhat worse in this respect? No. Even faster. And at lower memory footprint.

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And if you’re not happy with landscape’s astounding resolution,

Is CryEngine capped by a lower terrain resolution? No.

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you can use tessellation to make the landscape infinitely detailed

I would not be that sure about infinity. You will get capped at around medium frequency detail texture for next few years at least for sure.
Does CryEngine stop you from using tessellation on terrain? To some extent yes. It is not available out of the box. Difficulty of implementing it for terrain is somewhat comparable to properly doing POM in ue4.

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use texture displacement maps to physically bump geometric detail

So physically or geometrically? Is using texture displacement map is a feature unique to UE4 ? If no, why are you mentioning it?

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Tessellation was actually CHEAPER than parallax occlusion mapping in an underwater scene for a client, so yes, not only can you have tessellation in your final deliverable, but it is actually the preferred method!

How does being underwater affects performance of both? I can imagine only three cases where tessellation would outperform POM on landscape.

• Low frequency details, that do not require high multiplier
• High output resolution
• Improper POM implementation

I have no doubt, that for you, the third is the case. You already gave hints about that in your posts.

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Point being, even under the least ideal conditions, it still runs faster.

Point being, that there is no point telling people, involved in game development, to purchase new and specific hardware for themselves, especially in response to pinpointing a very specific and confirmed issue with landscape tessellation performance in UE4, and especially if you are not fully aware of what you are talking about.
And please, when posting abstract stuff like this this:

Old architecture that was optimized for older Direct X shading models will not run well in UE4

Have some sort of proof ready, for there is a good degree of difference between shader model and shading model.