Unreal Engine 5 uses Temporal Super Resolution, a technology optimized for Radeon graphics

Now Unreal engine will use temporal super resolution technology in its game engine. The Unreal Engine 5 presentation took place in May of last year, and it was quite complete, so we already knew its most important news. Yesterday, Epic Games confirmed the launch of the said engine in the “early access” phase, which means that it still has a final phase of development to go through before it is fully completed, and that the release of the final version will not take place until sometime in 2022.

During yesterday’s event, we once again saw technologies such as “Nanite” in action, which allows us to create games with complex geometry based on micro-polygons, or “Lumen”, which facilitates the implementation of a highly realistic global lighting system. Both were two of the great protagonists of the event, although they were not the only ones, the new generation shading through “Virtual Shadow Maps” also marked an important advance, since it improves the quality of the shadows regardless of the distance to the that they are.

Epic Games confirmed that, with the Unreal Engine 5, it has improved one of the great headaches of developers, the creation of animations, offering a set of tools and resources that facilitate this task, and that allow adapting different animations depending on of the actions to be carried out, the setting in which they take place and the characters in which we want to implement them. An important step forward, without a doubt.

Unreal Engine 5 and open worlds: Goodbye to the classic sandbox with invisible walls?

Temporal Super Resolution technology, unreal engine 5
Temporal Super Resolution

During the last 8 years we have seen a significant abuse of sandbox-type developments with invisible walls, which not only failed to give a sense of false freedom, but also revolved around two important limitations : we could find ourselves with truly open, but empty scenarios. and sparse in detail, or with more detailed and rich but smaller settings. Red Dead Redemption 2 is an example of the first concept, and Cyberpunk 2077 fits the second.

The Unreal Engine 5 aims to overcome this problem by adopting a new partitioning system , which allows dividing the world stage into a grid, and transmitting each of the cells in which it is distributed only when necessary.

To simplify collaboration, this graphics engine allows the development team to participate simultaneously in the creation of the same region, in an orderly and simplified way. The data layers also facilitate the creation of several versions, or visions, of the same world (day and night, past and future, etc.), something very important and very interesting, since with the standardization of SSDs it will allow the development of titles with dynamic, lively and changing scenarios. We have one of the best examples of what this technology can give of itself in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

Temporal Super Resolution Comes to Unreal Engine 5: Optimized for AMD Radeon

Temporal Super Resolution, unreal engine 5
Temporal Super Resolution

This has undoubtedly been the most important development from a technical point of view. AMD has confirmed that it has been working with Epic Games to ensure good support for its Ryzen CPUs and its Radeon GPUs on the Unreal Engine 5, and this has allowed for specific enhancements to be made for both components.

Nick Penwarden, vice president of engineering at Epic Games, said that the Unreal Engine 5 is optimized to take advantage of the Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs used by PS5 and Xbox Series X, and also for those components in their versions for PC. In fact, this graphics engine was compiled using AMD’s Threadripper processors.

Temporal Super Resolution is an algorithm that has been developed from scratch to take advantage of the potential of Unreal Engine 5, and that replaces the TemporalAA system of Unreal Engine 4. From the description given by Epic Games, it seems that we are facing a kind of alternative to NVIDIA DLSS, and it will be available by default and optimized for Radeon graphics cards. It seems important, but I am a bit shocked to see that Epic Games has not defined it as one of the most important improvements of Unreal Engine 5.

This algorithm is capable of achieving, in theory, a quality close to native 4K starting from a 1080p base resolution , improving performance and achieving high fidelity in rendering, generating less “ghosting” effect in high frequency backgrounds and reducing flicker in scenes with complex geometry. It is compatible with any hardware with Shader Model 5 support (D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan, PS5 and Xbox Series X-Series S).

From what I have seen, the result is not, at the moment, as good as Epic Games has indicated, since there are substantial differences between a scene rendered in native 4K and in 1080p rescaled with Temporal Super Resolution, but being a technology that is at an early stage we need to be understanding and give it a little leeway. NVIDIA has confirmed that DLSS is available with the Unreal Engine 5.

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