“Well you just said the answer yourself, which is correct. If you still need tessellation, then don’t use UE5.”
I’m sure people are sick of hearing this by now LOL
I’ve heard this “solution” many times before and I actually explored that option at one point myself last year after becoming really frustrated with the Tessellation situation. NVDIA rolled out RTXGI which is a really great addition to all of their other UNREAL based plugins, and I was willing to give that a shot. The only problem is that right before UE5 EA came out, I traded off my RTX 2060 and got a RADEON RX 6900 XT. AMD has always been my preference and the only reason why I purchased an RTX in the first place is because those GPUs were the only ones available for raytracing at that time. But this all changed by the time EA launched. My point is that due to this, I could no longer use NVDIA plugins and features.
For others like me who simply made the decision to go with a different GPU, unaware of what would come in the future, those individuals would have to choose between Lumen and Tessellation which is still pretty crappy. And honestly, I don’t think anybody was aware of how complicated things would be until they actually started using the software. This is why so many complaints about not being able to create terrain or use splats anymore only came after people had the opportunity to use NANITE. So saying things like we all knew what we were in for is not really the case.
I think we all had it in the back of our minds that even with the introduction of NANITE that EPIC would have a solution prepared to deal with this issue in engine along with the release. Not just for hobbyists but also for major studios that have adapted to the old way of doing things and now have to delay projects to change their entire workflow. Even the Modeling plugin that was incorporated into UE5 from way back when EA first launched, still as of right now cannot displace on color channels.
“It’s been well known for around two years now that tessellation was going to be depreciated.”
Its interesting because Hardware Raytracing has been deprecated as well for around the same amount of time, and yet it made it into the official version of UE5, working along side Lumen. That’s something which I was almost certain would NOT be the case. I even stopped depending on Hardware Raytracing because I didn’t want to get used to something that would be gone down the road. I assumed that Lumen would be a complete substitute for it.
And Lumen is definitely not finalized as there is much room for improvement, like better reflections or translucency for instance. These are things that work when utilizing Hardware Raytracing that currently don’t work well for Lumen, or at all.
Epic seemed to also be aware of this too I assumed which is why they didn’t remove Hardware Raytracing. Its just strange though that this way of thinking didn’t also apply when it came to the situation with Nanite and Tessellation, since Nanite is still not quite there yet either.
Maybe there are other factors that distinguish the two situations and its more complicated when it comes to dealing with mesh features? I dunno… I cant fathom how incredibly difficult it must be for these people to manage all of these features. However, in this case it just seemed like Epic wanted to make everybody have to depend on NANITE, their personal vision of how dealing with meshes in a game engine should be from here on out. The bit of Irony though (as others have pointed out) is that the biggest sell of this feature was supposed to make things much easier for the developers, but instead its actually put quite a heavy burden on us.
I feel like both Tessellation and NANITE could have worked along side each other, Tessellation simply being disabled on NANITE meshes and developers being the ones to make the creative decisions in terms of what is best for their projects when managing the optimization process.