As many of you must know, VXGI 2.0 is coming soon and will double the performance.
Would you consider integrating it inside the engine by default if it performs well enough on current hardware? VXGI 1.0 was way too ressource intensive to be used in a game but 2.0 looks way more performance friendly. I think it’s about time UE4 finally gets a real dynamic GI solution, XVGI 2.0 might just be our salvation.
Awesome! VXGI 2.0 looks promising and I hope it performs good enough to use it in our current project.
Probabaly not.
But worry not. We will get RTX integration which is unuseable in games.
It won’t be integrated by default, it makes some pretty extensive modifications to the engine and rendering plumbing and suchlike. If Epic were to implement NVidia’s tech into the default engine, users would expect them to support it like a first class feature - which obviously they aren’t going to do. It’s NVidia’s tech.
Fortunately for us however, there is a branch of the engine on NVidia’s GitHub that contains VXGI (has been there for several iterations now). If you watch the presentation, they state that they will be providing the VXGI 2.0 branch at some point in the future.
They said integration with UE4 mid April, but April is ending and there’s nothing on github yet or did I miss something. 
Didn’t they integrate some of Nvidia’s tech in Unreal already? Like the volumetric lighting and APEX? Maybe VXGI is a different beast, I dunno. I’m fine with a branch though.
Most articles are from 2-3 days ago, I think Nvidia are making sure that 2.0 is ready to ship (bug fixing, performance, etc…). It should not take long.
Im so excited!!!
Volumetric Lighting is their own internal technique I believe, and I think Apex is just a relic of UDK really. We do have our own cloth painter stuff now! I would say Apex / VXGI are very different beasts though - and Apex has no overhead if you’re not using it, whereas VXGI does I believe.
I cannot understand why dynamic GI is so low priority for Epic. We and many others would love to build enviroments with good dynamic lighting. Even something precomputed like Enlighten would help many devs.
Their main priority for now is Fortnite. And they want good scalability for it - PC, consoles, mobile devices. I doubt if it’s possible with any kind of voxel based lighting
Would be nice if we get both. VXGI 2.0 for games, RTX for high end visualisations / movies where you can afford an nvidia DGX, won’t be performant in consumer hardware for two generations probably.
Yeap. And they confirmed they RTX (realtime raytracing) support will be added into main this year.
You know. It doesn’t add up. RTX is fancy but useless for games, for next 5 years minimum (and realistically 10).
VXGI is as it is, but it is useable now. With more optimizations it can be pushed even onto lower end hardware (namely Voxelization pass, should not happen every frame).
To be fair, RTX is currently more tailored towards the film industry which they’re also concentrating on.
My guess is that they don’t think it’s possible on the platforms they want to support–meaning Xbox One, Switch, and lower-end PC’s
Maybe next gen it will get a focus
But why don’t they come up with their own dynamic GI solution? SVOGI in CEV looks amazing and runs great, even with dense forest environements (it actually runs better than UE4 when it comes to outdoors). I can’t see why they can’t come up with something. Hell even Unity has some dynamic GI. Hellblade also uses an external GI solution and it runs very well on PS4.
Lazyness lol
Every current solution only works under specific circumstances–for example the solution in Cryengine works fine for the types of games that they make, but it won’t work well for a lot of other types of games. The limitations of Enlighten are well known
Every technique got its downside… couldn’t we have at least one technique in the engine? Better somewhat usable than nothing or waiting for another 2-3 years for the perfect realtime solution (imo).
Unity uses Enlighten. And as I know it’s avaliable as is, with closed code. Enlighten is also avaliable for Unreal (Hellblade uses it), but it’s pretty expensive. We’ll get native solution for dgi when Epics will need it for their own projects. It’s too expensive to develop and support so huge feature just because other developers need it (look at LPV). Volumetric lighting was backlogged for years until they found that it may be useful for Fortnite, similar story with Mesh Distance Fields - initially it was developed for their own needs, and now Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, RayTraced Distance Field Soft Shadows are avaliable for everyone
I’m installing VXGI 2.0, it came out today. I hope it runs well enough to be used in production.