It seems that in my projects (in heavy scenes, mostly static, just with many tris) performance of 4.23preview4 is significantly worse than in 4.22. Is this something that is still worked on? Is there any particular element (in materials?) that I can look at for a cause/resolution? As it is now, it looks to be a bit challenging to migrate the project, since we can not afford to lose the performance…
Thanks for any tips! (and I’d be happy to provide more information, of course)
Hi RVillani. Thanks for the reply. I’m using a lot of masked materials, like trees and grass. It’s a open world. I watched a video about it and when “mask material only in early z-pass” was working, the performance was really better, but on forums people say it’s not working on 4.22. I’m not really sure if it’s or isn’t working, because I don’t know too much about it.
That’s why I asked if it will work on 4.23. I tried now (4.22.3) and looks like it’s not working, because it’s all the same color (red and white). I don’t know if it’s fixed on preview.
If it does not work, I will remake my trees and grass.
When I have a lot of grass on my map, my scene is 100% white on grass part, so the performance is really bad.
On the tutorial video I watched, the “Mask material only in early z-pass” turned on looked like a magical solution for my problem.
In preview 4 “Fixed! UE-76567 Undoing the selection of a bone in the ChaosDestructionDemo takes a long time”. What is “ChaosDestructionDemo”? Is it a demo project? If so, where can we find it?
The one thing I should also note in here, is that if something is reported in Preview X, it’s not guaranteed to be fixed immediately in the next preview release, or even the major release. It may get lumped into a hotfix, if possible.
Also, keep in mind that SIGGRAPH is happening this week so a lot of our rendering team is there giving talks and learning some cool things along the way.
“It’s still the same with the Translucent shadows being fully opaque”
I’ve previously mentioned this, I believe. This will not be solved in this release. I don’t know about 4.24 at the moment since that’s months down the road from now and a lot of development time still ahead to see.
While there are bugs with Ray Tracing, more often than not, because it’s a Beta feature still in active development, things like this are just a limitation of the current implementation.
Not really, but sometimes after an update I forget to copy and paste my old config files and it can be a bit of a shock until I realize. For instance, I use LODDistanceScale and similar variables to fine tune things and this can have a major impact on performance. Maybe that’s not your problem but I thought I would throw it out there.
Hi Unreal team – may I ask that you guys please revert the Event Track in Sequencer to what it used to be? I have no idea why it was changed – but it has now become needlessly awkward and complicated whereas it used to be very straight forward.
It was interesting reading about your mention of 4.24 and Ray Tracing being a Beta feature, because it made me reflect on how I myself started a discussion off asking if the 4.23 preview was really just going to be aimed at Chaos…Because in doing so, I was just accepting that RayTracing is just a Beta thing.
But, when I then look at how RayTracing has thus far been promoted, I am seeing is that it is not at all being promoted as some Beta feature that is just in testing. In fact, Epic is showcasing Raytracing in promotions and webinars as part of its strategic partnerships with other companies like NVidia, film and game developers, architectual visualization companies, and it is even used in part in showcasing of its online learning courses. You can imagine a lot of outside companies are probably devoting capital in buying hardware (ie RTX cards), as well as Unreal Marketplace assets, expecting that Unreal’s Raytracing is going to develop forward.
Which brings us to this Preview. Now, it’s one thing for us to not see any development moving forward, or very minimal, but what we are seeing is a degradation of functionality since 4.22. Leo Rakes posted a list of his ‘thus-far’ finds 7/24 post:
“Until the latest 4.23 Preview 3, RTGI was damaged, RT translucency was completely disabled, SSGI could not be combined with RT effect, LPV could not be combined with RT effect, which led to the only available GI effect under RT Shadow was RTGI, but its performance was so bad. Many parts of ray tracing look terrible, even worse than 4.22.3.”
Just know I understand the dynamic, I know from my own experience there always tends to be an organizational disconnect between marketing/front-line/customer-service and back-office/operations/IT. It is one of the joys of a big actively developing company. There are points when customers have unrealistic expectations, and there are points when you can pat operations on the back for doing an awesome job. But then there are times when developers need to know that they can’t be timid in setting goals to meet a demand or deadline. Because like it or not, Epic has set its foot into the Raytracing world and is promoting it as an active part of its engine. Raytracing development has to be a priority. I’ve seen it said that it is not a priority right now, but this indeed conflicts with what is being promoted in the public sphere.
And issues getting fixed is 4.24 is wonderful, but 4.23 comes out first - it can’t be released having a degraded Raytracing product. You will have people setting up projects in 4.23, then finding out it doesn’t work as good as 4.22, and then they can’t migrate their assets and have to rebuild scenes back in 4.22…a mess…
Also, with regards to the whole opaque shadow thing, like I said, this seems to be a usual phenomenon in render engines. I have seen the Octane Render developers in the past handle these type issues. As it so happens I am trialing the Octane Render plugin for Unreal now, and low and behold, look at what happened in a scene as it was converted to Octane (look at lashes and eyes, even hair!)-
(see image “Octane _01”)
Now, I know what will happen when I ask the developer about it, he will say it has to be fixed so that the alpha map displays properly for the translucent materials, and he will fix that and the shadows. Which brings me to this point - if your developers could instantly fix, they would, right?..
So let me offer this - I can tell the Octane developer that Unreal’s development is having difficulty with the translucent materials and shadows, and that it could be to both of your benefits to work together to come to a solution, as it would improve both the products, which would in turn be great for any users of wither product. I know with these things there would be restrictions and limits to release of proprietary details, but an exchange of general knowledge could speed this up for everyone involved. What do you think, would you want me to ask?
hi ,
blueprint create session working but find session not working for ps4 onlinesubsystem for online games.
please can you check these ? and if somethings wrong please fix it in 4.23 version
@Daffrendo The major issue is that “it can be easily fixed” but “will it be optimal in performance? no”, meaning it has always to be optimized for game industry, otherwise it would be in the stage already presented back there in the 1st Realtime Raytracing demo with 4 x Titan V and we all see it working right? Live action including…
My guess the development for Realtime Raytracing to be optimal for every kind of industry (games, film and arch-viz) will extend as much as UE4.26, so we still have 1 year+ to have it stable and labeled as “released feature” instead of “Beta feature”. Note that Niagara is also on Beta and is being developed since forever O.o … it just takes time to mature.
@Daddrendo I hear you on the marketing thing… I don’t remember them having conference-level presentations on Light Propagation Volumes, because it is considered experimental so that’s a fair critique.
I personally jumped on the UE4 bandwagon a year ago because of raytracing but It is basically unusable unless you do simple interior/archviz type work. Forget it for out-of-doors because it can’t be combined with ANY reasonable GI technology and the volumetric fog values when seen in raytraced reflections are too inaccurate (more fog in reflection than what nature would dictate for given distance.) not to mention the screwy translucency.I would be thrilled if we could even just have raytraced shadows with some other form of realtime GI. I have my doubts that RTGI will ever mature within the 2000 series timeline and will most likely be replaced by more efficient Nvidia tech like DDGI by that time. I personally think they should ditch RTGI for DDGI, especially if optimizations are the problem because DDGI only costs 1 ms at 4k and has NO NOISE. 1 ms!!! See link and video below.
Hi Nilson! as an outside developer using Unreal, what do you feel knowing Epic can’t make improvements to RayTracing sooner, like do you feel it impacts you?
Did they mention to you their difficulty in developing the RayTracing feature?
-Daffrendo
Impacts everyone, because people feel the need to use and show new things that they can do, because the tech is mind blowing when you think the possibility of having it realtime, my use for it and the engine before they mentioned it, was film, so now with the realtime aspect becoming so good, we are with our eyes turning on game ideas. I study the UE4 rendering module and most parts of the engine since 2016 and I keep following up what they do and also what AMD and NVidia has built with Unreal along these years… all I can say is that trying to make the engine work optimal to all of those industries are a hard task, I know because GPU tech is my thing for long and I say it most of experience than someone from Epic telling me, because the amount of ideas to improve it are just too many to try them all at once, so sometimes things break and there is nothing much someone can do, since it is not only one person working on it.
As I said, it just takes time to mature, and you have to consider the software outside Epic’s domain: DirectX12 shader model 6, Vulkan, NVidia drivers, so if any of those have issues… they depend on fixes on their side aswel.
