Budgeting in a Post-Polycount World | Unreal Fest 2024

In pre-production for Firesprite’s next title, they have learnt a lot about Unreal Engine 5.2 workflows and best practices. In this talk, Steve Walker, Director of Engineering at Firesprite, will look at how Budgeting has changed with the latest round of hardware and amazing Unreal technologies. He will then take a deeper dive and share Firesprite’s findings around memory consumption, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, and lighting, focusing on performance and achieving visual fidelity.

[DamienRamirez]

Finding it funny a lot of the things I've found with foliage, alpha cut outs swapping to fully modeled & shadow limiting matches up. Should of just waited a day or 2 & watched this rather than finding it all myself. The lights & shadow maps information I suspected as much going off my screenshot of shadows in testing them out for lighting scenes, But did that for Film so never gave it a second though for games... That said You might need multiple spot lights so I'd have to test vs stretch point lights in those situations,

[chriszuko]

Alpha Testing off during shadow passes is interesting. I'd be interested in how this is done in the engine code if possible O.O

[Aldraz]

It's just so unintuitive that having alpha mask is worse than having million more polygons lol.. why can't they just render the alphas as Nanite polygons too though?

[Heartbeats]

Interesting, can UE5's Lumen now handle static lighting?
A couple of years ago Lumen was dynamic only, so I wonder if there's something new here

[drinkwwwaterrr]

I really don't see how using nanite is better than having properly modeled geometry, especially since Unreal has LOD generation that works pretty well in most cases and saves tons of performance.

[SenD]

There are probably gamers who actually like motion blur and bloom. But it's the first thing I switch off.