It’s not going anywhere at the moment.
I am very glad too that EPIC currently plan to increase global performance and i have great hopes that EPIC will upgrade/invent something better for realtime lighting that works with all GPU manufacturers.
That’s sad…
Epic Games should pay more attention to Dynamic GI, since the other competitors already implemented it in their engines.
One thing I wonder about is how can we enable Heightfield GI but disable DFGI? If I don’t specify r.DistanceFieldGI = 1 in the ConsoleVariables.ini then DFGI is disabled but HeightfieldGI also is disabled.
…
How to Change Gi Intensity?
Distance Field GI or HeightField Gi , I don’t know how to change Gi bounce Intensity…
You can change the bounce intensity by increasing the indirect lighting intensity on your directional light.
I haven’t been able to get heightfield GI working on 4.12 or 4.11 for some reason; I configured everything and see it taking performance in the profiler, but was seeing no visual difference, even in the visualize GI view. On 4.8 I am able to get it working and see it within visualize GI and within the game.
So I just saw a behind the scenes video from Rare and they are saying that Sea of Thieves has fully dynamic GI using LPV. This really surprised me as if I remember right I saw someone from Epic saying that LPV is pretty much a dead end at the moment and Epic has no plans with it. After this seeing Distance Field GI popping up I thought that then this must be the GI tech they think worth working towards. Now what’s the deal?
Here is the vid: Sea of Thieves Inn-side Story #4: Let There Be Light - YouTube
I guess since LPV was available natively in the engine, Rare just decided to go with it instead of having no bounce light at all. Since they seem to mainly use it for loose and open environments, plus the fact that the look of their game is very stylized both helps to hide the shortcomings of LPV, mainly leaking and lack of precision.
What is the current best option for GI in UE4?
Lightmass.
Sorry. Should have specified Dynamic Lighting only.
LPVs.
Really horrible, but only stable option available.
Perhaps it is possible that Epic will update LPV to at least same level as Cryengine SVOGI or at least near. Second option is to use code based on AHR(RyanTorant) to improve or replace LPV?
Not even the slightest chance. And even if they’d want to do that, it’s better first they make the dynamic lighting without G.I efficient.
I remember reading in Crysis 3’s GDC docs that something about 14,000 or more dynamic lights were used in the game. :\
thanks for useful info but it is sad that this GI stuff is so far, just hope Epic engineers invent something wonderful AND optimize dynamic direct light even more.
Several years passed, is the XboxOne still not supported? Are the optimizations causing troubles? Are people using DFGI? Could you please give at least a short status report? What is done, what’s planned (or maybe it’s entirely dropped)?
Distance Field GI has been entirely dropped for years. Hopefully there’s some other solutions besides expensive RTX GI coming down the pipeline.
Recently released Control is using distance field reflections, which I’d love to see in UE4 (they are using Remedy’s proprietary Northlight Engine).
Nvidia also released a paper on Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination which is pretty cheap performance wise with a small list of cons RTX Global Illumination Part I | NVIDIA Developer Blog Maybe we’ll see something similar.
I asked about this but apparently Epic is not actively implementing it. But I think Unity is.
Yeah I don’t have a raytracing card yet, but Control is running fantastically at 1440p with distance field reflections on high.
Really hoping the engine starts transitioning from “useful for archviz” raytracing to “useful in a shipping game” raytracing. PS5 is gonna hit at about an RTX 2070 non super, at a target of 4k resolution for most games. There’s plenty of other things to throw power at besides “shiny raytracing” like maybe in game models with polycounts higher than the same as a decade ago, for one example.
And combining distance field tracing with triangle raytracing seems like a big win for speed, quality doesn’t matter if the effect is too slow to even run. Especially when all of Control’s raytracing effects suffer from obvious undersampling artifacts even when maxed out, other than DF reflections.
Edit- Also that “cheap GI” Nvidia paper isn’t even based on raytracing for the most part. It’s just an older compute shader based GI already shipping in The Division (1 and 2) with some questionably useful raytracing tacked on.