New feature Megalights

[covert valley]

Unreal Engine 5.5 Megalights - Tech Demo | Unreal Fest 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9XgF3ijVRQ

[spring cedar]

It looks impressive, not gonna lie (although the IGN video does a horrible job showing it properly due to compression). Here's a higher quality video:
https://youtu.be/hzcsKvrF-Ho?si=iMJZjyNRFwIMTd7x

My biggest concerns though are regarding performance, specifically the infamous shader stutters and CPU underutilization, which i'm noticing with recent UE games that are becoming bigger and more noticeable.

[covert valley]

YES, new UE games have become worse in performance.

[quiet wind]

My fear goes to the "My engine does that for me, why should I optimize?"

[tame sigil]

impressive, i don't see how games could be using that over light baking, not for another 10 years but this is probably geared for offline movie production anyway

[quiet wind]

i mean, the preview is on a ps5, so not really 10 years away 😄

[tame sigil]

ah yeah? i didn't know the ps5 was such a beast at raytracing and was thinking global desktop GPU as per Steam hardware statistics

[quiet wind]

I mean they say in the demo that they are running the demo live on PS5, so i doubt desktop systems will have much trouble as they are even stronger

[tame sigil]

"Steam statistics" meaning most common GPU. because we don't make james for the 0.1% that have 4070 ti

[quiet wind]

PS5 gpu is "equivalent" to RTX 2070, I dont know the full stats but I would assume if you start a game with megalights now and finish in 3 years 80%+ of gaming systems can run it

And if you want it in your game now and patch an existing game I would assume you can switch between megalights and baked with quality settings, if you really need it, and still have a good amount of users making use of it