They need to drop LPV and go with one of the better solutions
Maybe Epic can use combined ideas from VXGI, SVOTI, AHR, Enlighten to create superior LPV or just help to code AHR into usable stage and integrate/replace LPV. Just my solution.
they also have a “multiple bounces for skylight” card. hmm… interesting to see where this leads.
If they could, there would be some major wizardry involved. They’re pretty incompatible techniques as far as I’m aware. VXGI/SVOGI are completely different solutions than what LPVs do, while Enlighten actually prebakes the GI and uses material magic to make it react to lights properly.
The only way I could see that happening is if it automatically uses LPVs for lower spec (which they -should- be able to do on any hardware that even meets the min spec of the UE4 seeing as how my 6 year old laptop could run Crysis 2 with LPVs), while using the more complex SVOGI/VXGI tracing system for higher specs on dynamic objects, while doing an Enlighten style bake for static objects. Even typing that out, I’m not even sure it would make sense doing it like that, there’s a lot of repeated and redundant lighting systems in there.
The push for LPVs though is an interesting one, I am curious as to what they have in mind. It is worth noting however that the trello board says “investigating”, so it may just be some research on their part to see if it’s viable to use LPVs and not any specific action in mind yet. If nothing comes up, I wouldn’t be surprised if a SVOGI-like system was reconsidered now that a considerable amount of time has passed since the initial reveal of the tech 4 years ago.
You must have it configured wrong, it only has a 10 ms hit on my GTX 780 in a VERY heavy scene I’m working in with a lot of moving foliage. In the included sci-fi hallway demo they modified, VXGI is a 9ms hit. VXGI is meant to run faster on 900 series GPUs, it should be even faster for you. On the 980 Ti I tested it on once before, it was only a 4-6ms hit as well, it was getting pretty negligible.
Crytek’s SVOGI runs independently of light probes, it doesn’t use them except for the areas that SVOGI doesn’t cover like in the distance and for reflections if specular tracing is disabled. It has nothing to do with the performance. Also, vanilla SVOGI from the original elemental demo was running at 30 fps in 1080p on a GTX 580, it’s not too far fetched to say that after 4 years of work a GTX 780 would take a 2-4ms hit.
The with crytek is that if they see something is expensive, they work their way to make it cheap. But they don’t settle down to move it to backlog. Same with their SVOTI. And that’s still a WIP, I don’t know what a beast it will be later on but point being. But point being, it’s the old saying that says Either do one thing, and do a great job. Or do a lot of things and none of them will be done as good.
Yeah I saw the post I just didn’t have time to reply since roughly 1/3rd of the posts on that thread are discussing performance. Looking at the screenshots of the scene on the marketplace (not buying it just for the sake of running a performance test), there’s no reason why it should be running so slow unless it was a misconfiguration on your end. A 20ms hit is -not- standard for VXGI, my 3gb GTX 780 doesn’t even technically hit the minimum recommended requirements for using it and I’m still getting half that performance hit that you are, while my tests with a 980 Ti on other machines show it having the same performance impact as LPVs do on that hardware.
Only on lower specs when specular tracing is disabled. It’s not a requirement and doesn’t have any impact on performance from my testing.
VXGI with the settings tuned high enough gets the same quality as Lightmass itself does. By default to show off the tech, Nvidia set the default settings for everything higher than probably necessary.
Do the following:
r.VXGI.Mapsize 32
r.VXGI.Multibounceenable 0
r.VXGI.HighQualityEmittanceDownsamplingEnable 0
r.VXGI.StoreEmittanceInHdrFormat 0
In the post process:
VXGI Diffuse:
Number of cones - 4
Tracing sparsity - 4
Cone rotation off
Random cone offsets off
Tracing step - 2
VXGI Specular:
Probably not a good idea to have this on for a GTX 970, but if for whatever reason you really want it:
Filter - off
Seriously though, disable specular tracing if you want to squeeze a bit of performance out. It doesn’t have much of one though, I find it’s usually the difference of 1ms when the filter is off.
The results:
Seeing as how my hardware doesn’t even make the minimum spec for VXGI to begin with, I would say that’s not a bad result.
If you’re still trying to get more performance out of it, disable VXGI on things that update every frame that won’t impact the GI results that much, like the ocean material. It’s a per-material setting.
Right. The lightprobes are good for lower spec or disabling SVOGI, but there’s a reason that SVOGI has an option to disable the lightprobes entirely, they change the look visually and nothing more. They don’t impact performance. At all. It doesn’t run faster with them, it doesn’t run faster without them. The lightprobes are basically glorified ambient lights that use an HDR image, and don’t look correct with a major shift in lighting to begin with, that’s why SVOGI has the option to disable it when enabled.
Yeah that’s why I attached the image, it’s easier to see the results that way, and it’s the only kind of proof I can provide to show it does indeed work. The step/sparsity settings are some of the more important ones to have set, they have a pretty significant performance benefit using them. The tracing sparsity is the more important one, if you had to only pick one then that’s the better option. It’s more important to have the sparsity set to 4 for exterior scenes with a lot going on, if it’s interior you can probably push it up a bit along with the cones to get more accurate results. Thankfully it’s all in the post process settings so you can set it differently in different parts of the map.
Your 970 should be superior to my 780 in every way for this. If you’re getting a 20ms hit, then I would definitely say it’s something wrong with the scene in some way messing with VXGI. Even with a mapsize of 128, I still don’t get a 20ms performance hit on my 780, in 1080p with a mapsize of 128 it’s a 17ms hit. So for there to be such an enormous gap between what I’m seeing and what you’re seeing, it must be either the scene having something causing problems or a configuration.
It shouldn’t matter if there’s intersecting meshes really, it only voxelizes meshes that the light actually touches directly unless you have multibounce on. I’m not sure, but I would recommend you try building a scene from scratch with the assets and see if you can pinpoint a problematic mesh, I’m sure Nvidia would be interested to find out what’s causing such a huge problem.
Back on topic though, 2-4ms on a 780 for Crytek’s SVOGI is an amazing feat and they should be commended for it. I’m sure if the UE4 had realtime GI with that low of a performance hit, many users would switch over to using it overnight.
I know nothing about coding beyond some basic HTML and PHP tags but since the cryengine source code is available can’t anybody take the advantage of looking into it? can’t any team of programmers just have a quick look at it and bring back SVOGI and apply the improvements they learn from Crytek’s integration instead of spending time on LPVs ? Can’t we make a patreon page and fund them to do so?
I’m fairly sure the only thing stopping that is the license to the CryENGINE preventing it. There’s nothing actually really stopping them from doing it on a technical level, it’s just illegal. The license I believe stops you from taking components from one engine and putting it in another.
There are bunch of whitepapers on various types of real-time GI. A major chunk of work is optimization as implementing whitepaper is relatively trivial (if engine’s architecture allows it).
Has anyone run into a problem activating both the VXGI Ambient and the VXGI Specular? When enabling r.VXGI.AmbientOcclusionMode 1, the VXGI specular seems to be disabled, which I assume would be correct since that flag would isolate VXGI Ambient. With the flag set to 0, VXGI Ambient doesn’t appear to be contributing, yet the VXGI Specular contributes fine. Any thoughts?
Speaking of Crytek, they just released public roadmap for Cryengine V and if you look at it, their real-time GI solution is only good for terrains (outdoors).
The Cryengine V light solution looks good too in indoors and is no new is since more than a year.
You can do that but then the games are dual licensed or that it think.
But you can’t get the code of Cryengine and paste, is not that simple, and the EULA don’t allow that.
By the way to these ones that want automatic GI solution even the Cryengine solution need an artist.
Now these are some interesting specs… For a console:
That’s fine, but games will have to still work on the older systems
Yep, but nothing stops devs releasing version of the game with baked lighting for old systems and dynamic GI version for new systems. That’s how it’s been done for consoles. It’s irrelevant for PC.
Like, there is no excuse not to have dynamic lighting like in Crysis 3 (besides lack of manpower).
I was playing a game today, that is made in a custom engine, seens to use realtime light, at this point I think Epic should add this, the light by default in UE4 is too plannar when is realtime, the light colors bounces are not that needed as the penumbra zones are need, since this give dark zones in a more logic way, lets say is like the distance fields but better , LPV already do something like that, but I imagine a shadow only system without calculate the light color bounces and only the base bounces and penumbra zones then could be nice you can add later with lights the details of intensity in light color bounces with a less cost of a complete GI system.
You can take as example last 2016 AAA games, what near all uses 100% realtime light, and there is what I mean by dark zones (since in the last year all have way big dark tones).