Why Unreal Engine 5.3 is a BIG Deal [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why Unreal Engine 5.3 is a BIG Deal [video]

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Has anyone seen a technical explanation for how Nanite is implemented?

As someone technical but lacking domain knowledge in the gaming/graphics industry, I'm very curious about the way this is being explained as cheaper to render than high detail polygons.

There's a lot of techniques applied. It's not really "one new revolutionary thing" but a bunch of things and research over the past 20-30 years put together to make nanite possible. This video might shed some light https://youtu.be/eviSykqSUUw

When I first saw Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite, I thought this is it. Well it turns out there were lot of area where Nanite couldn't be used in Unreal 5.0, Luckily after 1.5 year with 5.3 seems to have added most of the missing pieces.

Which makes me wonder what else is cooking in the pipeline.

In fact we have badly optimized games, that cannot be run 60 fps native resolution even on 4090. With not that better visuals. Yes those visuals are now much cheaper to produce, but in the cost of end users.

Nanite was/is optimized for "next gen consoles" like the PS5 which has now become the current gen consoles. Things like direct NVMe-to-GPU asset loading, bypassing both the CPU and OS, is still early beta tech on PC.

And it's also completely unneeded as you can see when running Forsaken or Ratchet & Clank on PC without it.

Those are not games that fully utilize the PS5's NVMe-to-GPU asset loading tech. Things like actually flying over a giant open world map without merely teleporting.

Is it a decent video? The title indicates to me that it’s hot garbage. But I’ve been proven wrong before.

Edit: As it turns out it is in fact a highly informative video. Shame they felt the need to use a title like that. Probably works to a degree I guess.

It blows my mind sometimes that we have these literal god tools at our disposable. Proprietary for now, but Open Source always catches up

As someone who's new to making games (started a year ago), to me it seems that yes, there are open source things here (like Godot), but the process of getting even something simple like 3D camera controls working is so fiddly that it's not worth it. Compared to the cut Steam & co are taking, plus the money you need to pay for other software (e.g. Substance Painter) the UE fee is comparatively tiny.

Looking at the amount code of UE, I don't think Godot & co will truly catch up. There is just no business model that would make large scale development viable.

Nanite and Quixel combo is a different beast. There won‘t be an „open souce“ alternative until some AI comes up with a different solution.

Every 5.x release these videos come up and it's never a big deal.

>and it's never a big deal.

So what do you expect or your definition of "big deal"?

If everything is a big deal, nothing is.

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