Check out this Unreal Engine 5.6 tech demo for The Witcher 4, running on PlayStation 5 with raytracing. This Witcher 4 tech demo shows off the new Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin to load open-worlds faster, and we see how UE 5.6 handles busy scenes full for high-fidelity character models and visual effects like ML Deformer. Additionally, we see Nanite Foliage in action, which provides a memory-efficient way to achieve high density (and fidelity) foliage, slated for release on UE 5.7.
What did you think of the first look at potential Witcher 4 gameplay?
What did you think of the first look at potential Witcher 4 gameplay?
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GamingTranscript
00:00This is a technological showcase set in the world of The Witcher 4.
00:07What you just saw and are going to see now is running on a standard PlayStation 5
00:14at 60 FPS with ray tracing.
00:17So in the game, you'll be playing a Siri, a professional monster slayer, a Witcher.
00:23She explores the world and hunts down the Monster 4 coin.
00:27The region we are in is called Kovir and you'll get to explore it in a game.
00:33Right now, Siri is investigating a monster and after gathering new clues,
00:37she is heading back to a nearby village.
00:45Alright everyone, meet Kelpie!
00:52So just like Geralthead Roach, Siri has her own loyal companion.
00:58We return to town.
01:02These two characters need to feel like one.
01:04Since you're going to explore the world on horseback,
01:07riding needs to feel seamless, natural and just fun.
01:10Yeah, and to support that, we're introducing multi-character motion matching in Unreal.
01:15So Siri and Kelpie, they're perfectly synchronized when mounting from any angle and speed.
01:20And we also support root motion movement on Kelpie.
01:25So controlling her feels realistic and grounded.
01:29And there are also some really nice improvements to our Unreal Chaos Flesh Solver
01:34and these machine-learned deformations.
01:36So you've got realistic muscles moving and stretching under Kelpie's skin
01:40without compromising the performance there.
01:42So let's leave Siri behind for a second and talk about the world itself.
01:54So much of the Witcher world is natural, organic.
01:58Especially Covier with its dense forest and wild nature.
02:02Yeah, and wild nature is hard.
02:05And with Nanite Geometry, we've freed artists from so many of their old constraints.
02:09But we don't want to rest until everything we do in Unreal has that same spirit of freedom.
02:14There's always more work to do.
02:16And foliage is a huge piece of that puzzle.
02:19So we are excited to introduce Nanite Foliage.
02:24And in order to achieve gorgeous foliage density everywhere,
02:29while still being memory efficient, fast to render,
02:31we believe that a new idea was needed.
02:34So instead of the same card approach we've been using for the past 20 years,
02:38artists should be free to take a Nanite approach to foliage,
02:42modeling every single leaf and pine needle.
02:45And the old LOD tricks of the past, they needed a complete rethink.
02:50And in their place, it's a new adaptive voxel representation in Nanite.
02:55It's volumetric. It's fully 3D.
02:57It is super fast to render.
02:59And these dense clusters of triangles turn into these cubes,
03:02which at a distance, they're no larger than a pixel.
03:05And they react to the changing light of our dynamic sun and our shadows.
03:09They allow artists to render whatever amount of foliage is needed
03:12to achieve their vision without compromise.
03:15And no compromise means how ambitious we are
03:19when it comes to bringing our vision to life with incredible visuals.
03:23But more than that, together with Epic,
03:25we created fast a way throughout the world.
03:28We can now bring in more content more quickly for the smoothest possible experience
03:32as we fly down to catch up with Siri.
03:49Welcome to Valgrist.
03:51So Valgrist is a port town, a hub for fishing, freight and mining.
03:55It's one of those places where you can meet shady characters
03:59or overhear gossip from other lands.
04:01It's also where Chewie took on her current contract.
04:04Hi-tech, let's leave Kelpie here and explore the marketplace and food.
04:10I'm so excited we can finally show you some of this stuff.
04:16Let's see what Valgrist has to offer.
04:18Let's see what Valgrist has to offer.
04:46Guys, notice how responsive the world is.
04:50Character actions directly affect what happens around you.
04:54Sometimes even setting off chain reactions.
04:56Everything is working together.
05:06Or look at this poor gentleman being taught how to fly by an angry innkeeper.
05:11That's what happens when you cheat at Gwen.
05:14Last of it? Is it?
05:16The first one is this.
05:20This is the guy who gave the questions on.
05:25Like you probably suspect he has his own agenda in all of this.
05:35There's no agenda in all of this.
06:05For the soul?
06:07I found not one speck.
06:09I presume this comes as no surprise to you.
06:13No, no.
06:15Kabir's smuggling trade is of no concern to me.
06:19The manticore that flattened your cart and devoured your men?
06:25Quite the opposite.
06:27Manticore?
06:29No, no. Them winged hellspawn dwell in the arse end of Creighton.
06:35While Ciri decides what to do about that merchant,
06:38let's take a look at the character technology that powers this marketplace.
06:41Why don't we listen in on these fishmongers?
06:44They're selling their wares, chatting up customers.
06:59And there is tons of tech at play here.
07:03Even in this simple market stall.
07:05MetaHuman tools, improved Unreal smart objects, chaos cloth, and more.
07:10Yeah, and all of this exists to make sure that the gap in quality
07:14between Ciri and NPCs is as small as possible.
07:18Yeah, and closing that gap, it's not just about fidelity, right,
07:21but also authenticity.
07:23They should react to changes in the world around them.
07:27But the prisoner in pillar isn't exciting enough for valve rest.
07:32Let's grab everyone's attention with the circus.
07:43But the great performance deserves a huge crowd though.
07:46Let's crank it up.
07:48So you are seeing tons of optimizations here to many of Unreal systems,
08:02including an entirely new Unreal animation framework,
08:06allowing us to fit easily in our 60 FPS budget,
08:09not just in rendering, but also with room to spare on the game thread.
08:13Over 300 animated skeletal mesh agents all going about their business.
08:18And the whole point is to leave breathing room for developers like you
08:22to introduce the gameplay and the systems that your players expect,
08:26empowering you to make your worlds come to life
08:29without Unreal standing in your way.
08:32You are right.
08:33You are right.
08:34That's the open-world RPG that we are making.
08:37But before we wrap up, how about one final check-in with Ciri?
08:47We are making this game to be the most immersive and ambitious
08:50open-world Witcher game ever.
08:52And we are making this a reality thanks to our work on Unreal
08:56with the team at Epic.
08:59I think what we are doing together is going to bring in a new generation
09:02of open-world RPGs.
09:04And I'm so proud of what we accomplished so far.
09:07We are too.
09:11So we're almost done, but before we go,
09:13here's a small gift for all Witcher fans.
09:16A first look at Lan Exeter.
09:33Onward, Kelvin.
09:35We've worked.
09:46Thanks, guys.
09:48Seriously, it looks amazing.
09:51And we've also barely scratched the surface
09:53of what's coming in Unreal 5.6.
09:55So here's Julien to tell you even more.
09:58Thank you very much.
09:59Thank you so much.
10:16Thank you so much.
10:21Hey, everyone.
10:22Great to be here in Orlando.
10:24I spent a lot of time on this demo,
10:26so I'm happy to be the one to talk about
10:29what went into the 5.6 release.
10:32An open world like that was just the perfect content
10:35to focus on our main goal for the release,
10:38which was performance.
10:40We want the engine to scale to large and rich worlds.
10:43We want to preserve graphics quality.
10:46And, of course, we want to deliver high frame rates
10:50that you and your players expect.
10:52So let's check it out, starting with rendering.
10:56If you all remember,
10:58when we released Nanite with UE5,
11:00it supported static geometry.
11:03Last year, we brought skinning to Nanite.
11:06And now we're working on Nanite foliage.
11:10The only way to have a forest that looks as good as this one
11:15is to use 3D geometry for all parts of the trees,
11:19just like we do for everything else.
11:22However, this is a crazy amount of fine geometry.
11:26So we have to rethink how trees are created and displayed.
11:31To create them, we developed Nanite assemblies.
11:37These 28 little parts that you see are all that we use
11:41to build all the spruces from the forest.
11:44They are instanced thousands of times
11:46and used like building blocks to assemble trees in different ways.
11:50And as you probably noticed with the wind effect,
11:54they even support skeletal animation which runs on the GPU.
12:00Thanks to assembly, we greatly reduced the storage,
12:04the runtime memory, and the rendering cost.
12:07Then, to display an entire forest,
12:11the challenge was to preserve fidelity and performance from any distance.
12:15Let's check up close the level of detail we're talking about here.
12:24Lots of details.
12:26But this triangle representation is not the most efficient when far away
12:30due to the amount of overlapping.
12:32And that's why we made an adaptive voxel representation.
12:36But in reality, you'll never see those voxels this close
12:40since when we move the camera back, they're barely a pixel.
12:45Nanite foliage is almost done.
12:47We are moving it to the main line as we speak,
12:50and it will be available for everyone in 5.7.
12:55Another thing I would like to share is that ray tracing and lumen
12:58now run more than twice as fast with no visual trade-off
13:02compared to when UE5 was released.
13:04And because of that, we can now hit 60 FPS on consoles.
13:09And finally, we rewrote the rendering pipeline to run asynchronously
13:14so you can increase the richness of your scenes even more.
13:18Now let's talk about chaos physics.
13:21For chaos-clot, we improve our clot-to-clot constraint solution.
13:26This removes a lot of collision evaluation
13:29when garments are piling up and interacting with each other.
13:33Even for complex setup like series cape,
13:36we hit a sub-millisecond budget on PS5.
13:41With chaos-flash, we introduce procedural muscle activations
13:45to make deformation and motion more natural.
13:48Your artists will still have control over tetrahydral simulation
13:52and train ML models that run fast in real time.
13:56We now support the baking of fluid surface data into lightweight assets
14:01to be played back at low cost.
14:03This is going to give you high-fidelity water
14:06without the performance cost of real-time fluid simulation.
14:10For animation, we work on both performance and fidelity.
14:16Here, you can see how Siri and Kelpie match up in their interaction.
14:21Well, that works no matter the angle of approach.
14:24That's our most character motion matching solution.
14:29We also added motion matching in sequencer to build stitch tracks.
14:34With them, you can seamlessly transition from gameplay to cinematic.
14:41Also, we now have a secondary layer of animation driven by physics in Control Rig.
14:47We used it in Kelpie's rig to drive the main, the tail, and the saddlebacks.
14:54And now, I'm happy to announce that all these features are already integrated
14:59into our new Unreal Animation Framework,
15:02which we are releasing as experimental in 5.6.
15:06We built it with performance first in mind.
15:10Animation evaluations are now running in parallel off the game thread,
15:14which was our bottleneck.
15:17And for the other character systems that are just as costly,
15:20like movement, avoidance, state-free behaviors,
15:23we also move them to worker threads.
15:26This is really going to help you create scenes that are crowded and lively.
15:33Streaming has always been a big deal regarding performance.
15:37And the three biggest improvements we made are
15:40of physics state creation, which now runs async,
15:43improved runtime PCG for ground scatter on GPU,
15:47and a new fast geo plugin to stream static geometry.
15:52And just to take a different example, in CitySample,
15:56the streaming time was cut down by 90% while moving at high speed.
16:01We focus on a lot of areas for performance in 5.6,
16:05and mobile is no exception.
16:08We work on better defaults and scalability settings for mobile,
16:12and minimize the default package size.
16:15We also improve our workflows with a UI refactor of the viewport toolbar
16:20and content browser,
16:22an on-device iteration workflow,
16:26and a mobile preview solution.
16:31So there you go.
16:34Unreal Engine 5.6 is all about performance,
16:37and it's available today.
16:47Please go, enjoy the Tech Talks and session we have for you guys,
16:50and come chat with us.
16:52And now, please welcome Chris from the MetaHuman team.
16:55Thank you very much.
16:57Thank you very much.
16:58Thank you very much.