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Discussing VRAM Optimization, Ray Tracing, Nanite, and Graphics Architectures with an Unreal Engine 5 Dev- Guest Telegrams (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-31 18:10:27
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Broken Silicon's next guest will be an Unreal Engine 5 Developer!  Based on early talks we plan to discuss:

VRAM Optimization - Performance Trade-Offs, Memory Usage

PC vs Console Optimization, and the future of 8GB Cards

What Next Gen Consoles & GPUs should focus on for Improvements

Thoughts on Ampere, Lovelace, and RDNA 2/3

Ray Tracing

FSR and DLSS

Virtual Reality

Game Engines, Modding, Nanite

Game Dev Crunch

I would say this guest is a little more on the software and future-design side than "current hardware" side, but he can definitely speak with some authority about any recent hardware releases.  So while we do intend to focus heavily on optimization and the future of CPUs, VRAM, and Consoles - you can ask just about anything related to our "standard subjects".

You have ~48 hours (till Sunday Morning US Central Time) to submit your thoughts and questions below.  Be concise, be thoughtful, and use good grammar to be considered!

Comments

yoda king

Hey Tom and Guest, I've noticed how many developers mostly Triple AAA have chosen to adopt unreal engine 5 for their next games. Is there any reason to be worried that this will cause certain games to feel samey? Much like how many games using the source engine sort of look or feel the same as each other?

Friedrich Günther

What are your experiences with regards to driver quality from a developers standpoint with AMD, Intel respectively Nvidia?

BrazGhost

With the dominance of UE, do you feel stagnation is starting to show in the development of the UE? A lot of companies are going to UE and I feel that a monopoly is starting to show. I also worry that they may influence much more for companies being required to put the games on Epic Games store. I could be just being too pessimistic, but I always expect greed in any industry.

Manuel Nascimento

Hey Tom and distinguished guest. We’ve seen recently many games come out on PC with various stuttering issues and shader compilation issues. What is going with this? Is it a case of not enough time given to devs to solve the issue, low QA time afforded, engine limitations, too many platforms and component combinations on PC, pressure from publishers to release the game? All of the above, something else? I’d love some input since it’s frustrating to experience these issues that tarnish the experience of playing awesome games. Thanks!

Prior is the theme 999

Hello Tom and Mr Developer, I’ve been waiting for a dev to ask this question. What is the deal with all these performance issues plaguing pc gaming recently. In the MLID discord I’ve been told that it stems from game engines, vram, or i/o and the way pc just isn’t able to do things that consoles do at least currently. As a developer are there way to develop around that without impacting the vision or is the only way to essentially brute force it and have higher vram requirements, system ram etc?

Leeroyer

Hi Tom and Guest, I know my question is kind of not in the topics, but I would like to ask you(guest) if you are already using AI tools to help/speed up game development. I ask that because, as a fellow game programmer, mobile though, I'm kind of overwhelmed by the possibilities AI brings to the table, from IDE plugins to help coding, examples of whole open world levels being generated by AI, 3d modeling, animation rigging, it seems that AI can help in almost every aspect of a game development, even on creative stuff. How do you guys see the future of AI as a tool for game developing and how it would improve the games? I think we gonna spend less time doing boring stuff and focusing more on things that really matters and makes difference to gamers. (Sorry my bad english)

Brad Corrupts

With a modern engine like UE5, do you think some developers will start to utilize more than 16 threads for games, and if so, how will the game handle processes with asynchronous caches such as the Zen 4 X3D series?

10GHz Netburst

How do you see Unreal as having evolved over time? I still vividly remember a number of UE3 games that were extremely locked down and "consolised" for lack of better word. It was impossible to inject things like MSAA into the renderer even though that was possible for most other engines from the time. (It didn't even have antialiasing to start with) On the other hand many UE3 games have a lot of big modding scenes so there seems to be some openness in that sense? Are those kinds of features discussed much when designing the engine itself?

MooresLawIsDead

You know I gotta say that the more we drive for more performance, the more we want games to become complex (in all departments) while having impressive graphics - then the more we need engines to attempt to optimize to each piece of hardware. On console - there's one (or 5 for XBOX lol) pieces of hardware that can be pre-compiled perfectly and have no issues. This is kinda just a side-effect of PC gaming becoming so disparate in configuration that there's no elegant way (right now) to do this for some devs. I'll likely ask this question btw, but I do want to jump in here myself and remind people that there really are reasons games on PC are being built the way they are right now....it's not just laziness or lack of resources all the time.

Deadeyes

Hi Tom and Guest! In the examples of lumen we have seen so far "software lumen" seems to be hardware agnostic and cheaper to run at the expense of quality when compared to "hardware lumen." It seems to me that using dedicated accelerators should inherently make something cheaper to run, so why is hardware lumen so much more taxing? If it's just because of the extra fidelity, why haven't we seen a potato setting for hardware lumen that allows for a software lumen quality level, but with a comparatively smaller performance hit? It feels wasteful to have RT cores sitting doing nothing because I switched to software RT for better performance. Thanks! Glad I finally joined the Patreon!

KarbinCry

What is your opinion of AMD's new FidelityFX, particularly Cauldron 2.0?

Manuel Nascimento

No worries from me, I get it, thus I mentioned the “multiple component combinations”. I’m very interested in an Unreal 5 DEV’s perspective.

Deadeyes

Digital Foundry talks a lot about this. Theyre one of my other favorite gaming/tech channels. They have reported recently that there are big changes coming in UE5 that should go a long way to making shader comp stutter a thing if the past!

Frobozz

Does raytracing have value for calculations other than rendering light accurately? Is it effective for line of sight, hit box calculation, 3D audio, or anything else?

SaltyInternetPirate

Not something I want answered in the episode, but are you planning anything special for episode 200? Maybe having Dan and a guest on together?

KarbinCry

Do you think we will see computer vision utilised in creation of game worlds ? For example, drive a car with cameras through a city to automatically create a full 3D cityscape, and perhaps even match materials from the video to a texture library?

KarbinCry

How soon will we see actual deep learning techniques used in video games - be it for NPC AI (either behaviour, or even dialogue and voice), or for complex physics?

KarbinCry

With Epic's broadening focus, isn't Unreal becoming a bit bloated for games and game development, since a lot of it is now catering to other uses - architecture previz, live volumes?

Deadeyes

....isnt lumen just a brand name for UE5 ray tracing?

KarbinCry

Could you explain the real benefits of using mesh shaders instead of traditional vertex shaders?

Falto

Once games stop releasing games on ps4 and Xbox one, will that mean pc requirements to play games will increase? I ask as I've dabated with people and they simply claim "bad optimization" as to why old gpus aren't able to game x, that is only on new consoles, at same settings compared another game that is on old consoles.

Kinihun25

Hey Tom and Guest, I don't know how to feel about 8GB VRAM cards, part of me says that 8GB is enough for 1080p but games are coming out that even at 1080p the VRAM buffer is getting close to 8GB or even over. Do you think getting a 6800 right now for $450 is better than a $350 7600XT in the future? The 6800 may have the worst ray tracing performance but will do better in higher resolutions. Thanks for all that you do.

Prior is the theme 999

I should have clarified nvidias hardware ray tracing vs Ue5’s software ray tracing. But yea you’re right it is just a branding thing

Prior is the theme 999

When developing your game(s) on UE5, how much emphasis and resources are put to nvidia hardware accelerated ray tracing? With lumen it seems like hardware ray tracing is not necessary. Five years in to this ray tracing era and it seems like it’s still a “it’s nice to have but it’s not necessary feature”. I didn’t even know until recently that the new COD doesn’t have it in the game and the lighting is superb in my opinion from the campaign. Is nvidia’s ray tracing another Nvidia Hair works that will be forgotten, and will software technologies like lumen be the default going forward?

KingHarkinian

What are the upcoming technologies to evolve gaming? Lumen basically allows fully dynamic light/shadows. Nanite is a sort of super evolved auto LOD. What's next in line to advance games in graphics or physics?

KingHarkinian

With the growth of ML, when can we expect to start seeing gamemakers use it for enhancement of models/graphics/textures? Things like enhanced facial features, time-consuming details on a model, or making bodies feel more realistic? Would this take away a lot of grunt work from human developers?

Swiggles

Hey guys, would you mind please explaining to everyone what unreal engine 5 and Ray tracing actually do for game creation efficiency. I hear a lot of people that are very dismissive of Ray tracing cuz they don't understand what it does for the creation side. I see a lot of people who also over exaggerate how great unreal engine 5 is by just popping a hulk model and calling it a teaser for a new game.

KingHarkinian

At the recent GDC, AMD's marketing was pushing really hard on the fact that the State of Unreal demo was made on Threadrippers and Radeon XTXs. Is this something that had a technical justification, or just a business one? How important is it for UE to run on Radeons over GeForce, and how much impact does RDNA2/Radeon being in consoles have on your decision?

PCDog

Recently, Fortnite got updated to UE5 and now uses Lumen ray tracing. The benchmarks that I’ve seen report similar RT performance between Nvidia and AMD cards utilizing Lumen. This was seen with hardware RT and software RT. Is there something in UE5 that has optimized RT performance on AMD cards that can now match Nvidia or is Fortnite an outlier?

Brad Medlin

Hey Tom and Not Dan Guest, I’ve done some compiling in UE5 before and seen first hand how much better AMD processors are…it’s somewhat mind boggling how much better they are. Do you see any other use cases where UE 5 prefers certain hardware over another

Jen-Hsun Huang, AI is not circular

Why are game developers failing to optimize for the perfect VRAM amounts I gave to provide gamers with the best performance per dollar possible?

Cleansweep

What do you think of the state of modding with modern game engines? While I appreciate it when games offer official SDKs, I find it concerning that they're often locked to one service or another, effectively gatekeeping mod making to those who already have an account with Steam/Epic/GOG/whatever. I find this increase in barriers to entry depressing, especially since the communal knowledge for modding is increasingly being centralized in Discords, instead of publicly accessible wikis and forums.

Screw Dropper

Hi Tom and Guest, Recently the Godot game engine got a big update (version 4) and it seems to be catching up to the larger engines. Have you looked into the update, and what are your thoughts on Godot overall? Also, is it a large advantage for a game engine to be free and open source, or does it not really make a difference for a developer.

Samantha Vimes

How is UE5's DirectStorage implementation expected to impact the need for system RAM and VRAM? Could DirectStorage help cards like the 3050 remain viable longer?

Waqar Khan

Hey Tom and guest, I've been playing Forza Horizon 5 on my laptop, 3070ti, and my desktop, 7900xtx, and there was something peculiar I noticed. At the same settings and resolution they are using different VRAM amounts. I have to wonder, is that a common occurrence, is it due to the differing VRAM amounts thusly the game is optimized around trying to use as much ram as possible and do devs code for this specifically. As a kind of aside, are we eventually going to get to a point where cranking up the textures just doesn't show any visual improvement?

Woody Chang

Hi Tom and UE5 Developer, What do you think will be the main challenges in developing VR in UE5 on PC? Are there any best practices that developers can do to mitigate those challenges?

Samantha Vimes

Based on what you've seen with UE5 development should next gen consoles focus on maximizing the potential of DirectStorage or are there other memory technology that are lower hanging fruit?

Samantha Vimes

Looking at the comparative performance of hardware lumen vs software, how important do you think dedicated hardware is to the future of RT? Will hardware RT ultimately be unnecessary, say 10 years from now?

Samantha Vimes

What's the minimum amount of VRAM you want to see on a next gen consoles? If that future happened how would that impact the fate of 8GB or less video cards?

FloridaMan

When it comes to VRAM, why does it appear that developers are doing less with more? On low settings Last of Us Part 1 appears to have its original PS3 texture quality, but still needs 6 gb of VRAM at 1080p

Matheus Duque

Hello Tom and Guest, I once again have to ask about async timewarp, it seems like a great technology that is easier than frame generation at the same time having a much lower impact on image quality. Why isn't every game using it? Is there some pitfall or limitation that prevents adoption?

Prior is the theme 999

PSVR2 is reporting poor and lower sales than expected. Will this be a wake up call to Sony and the poor pricing of the device or will they wait it out till an appropriate competitive device launches?

Chris Rijk

For anyone looking to buy a sub $500 GPU to play modern games on, what would you recommend given increased concerns about VRAM usage? What about sub $400? For lower-end cards launching this year, do you think it would be viable to use double sized GDDR chips so that an 8GB card becomes a 16GB card for example? Longer term, are there any alternatives that you’d like to see? (Something technically feasible, even if unlikely to happen in practice)

Chris Rijk

For a games developer, or game engine developer, what are the benefits of having a unified memory system where the GPU and CPU have equal access to all memory? Does it help improve performance? Does it help reduce memory usage? How big of an impact does the split memory pool on the Xbox really have? Longer term, is it going to become inevitable for low-end gaming PCs to become dominated by APUs if they are the more efficient and cost effective solution?

Chris Rijk

There’s a lot of complaints about poor ports, whether from console to PC or vice versa. I would imagine that the more a particular game is optimised for one platform the harder it becomes to port well to another. Is this common across all game engines? Does UE5 have any features or tools that can help mitigate these problems and if so can you point to any examples of this being successful with real games? Would you expect this problem to become better or worse in the years ahead?

Chris Rijk

Would you like to see AMD make a high-end workstation based on the MI300 processor for game developers? How much do you think companies are willing to spend to help improve developer productivity?

Chris Rijk

One of the fundamentals of computing is automation. I’m not a games developer but where I work we use a lot of automated software testing and it’s a very useful tool when done right. However, I see very little discussion of this with regards to game development. I know UE5 has features to help automate testing but have you used them? How much of a game can realistically be tested using such tools? I’m not suggesting it would be a silver bullet but could it help mitigate the “dev crunch”?

Tick Dickler

Hi gang! Excited to have somebody from UE5 on the show! I wanted to ask, if you had to guess, around how much more performant and efficient will UE 5 be able to become over its lifespan? I know optimizing and improving on engines is a huge deal, but post-release, to use a bad metaphor, how much gas is still in the tank? If we could get to 4k60 on a base ps5 without upscaling then that would mean I don’t have to move my couch back.

Ryzza5

When can we expect to start seeing AA and AAA UE5 games hit the market. What system requirements is the industry targeting for a next-level experience? Are game-makers waiting for players to move away from old hardware, or are they confident enough that players will upgrade when their hardware is no longer performant enough? If someone upgrades their GPU but keeps an older system (i.e. Z390), will they be bottlenecked for UE5 titles by their CPU (i.e. 9900k, PCIe 3.0 GPU/SSD, DirectStorage support, <16GB VRAM, etc).

Ryzza5

Nvidia made a big deal about turning RTX on for older games such as Portal. Have you seen much more progress in this area or have the slow RTX 4000 sales prevented modders and artists continue enhancing more games?

cockblockula

Hello! For those of us who are less technically gifted, do you think you could explain why devs find vram and cache very useful to have? Do the hardware companies collaborate with you guys when deciding what features to add onto their products?

cockblockula

I know it's too early to tell, but do you think frame generation has had some difficulties being adopted by developers? There doesn't seem to be many games, both new and old, supporting DLSS 3. From the developer perspective, is it harder to support as opposed to the past upscaling technologies?

Samantha Vimes

Have you seen the recent "GPU Upload Heaps" feature implemented within DirectX 12? It uses Resizable BAR to allow CPU and GPU simultaneous access to VRAM without the need to copy data to system memory. Do you see technologies like this increasing or decreasing the need for VRAM over the long term?