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[Digital Foundry] Fortnite's Unreal Engine 5 Upgrade Reviewed - Lumen/Nanite at 60FPS - PS5 vs Xbox Series X/S + PC!

life of brian GIF
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Here they only use pure GPU compute (an aread where 25% bandwidth advantage might come in handy). So as such this demo is not comparable to Matrix demo (or Callisto protocol) which rely heavily on accelerated hardware intersection for the reflections.
 

Zathalus

Member
Here they only use pure GPU compute (an aread where 25% bandwidth advantage might come in handy). So as such this demo is not comparable to Matrix demo (or Callisto protocol) which rely heavily on accelerated hardware intersection for the reflections.
What demo? This is the flagship game by Epic as a proof of what Unreal 5.1 can deliver. Also do you have any proof of your claims?
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Funny how on different platforms, the killfeed shows EXACTLY the same.

Bullshots!!!

You do know they use exact same spectator cams on all consoles to ensure every machine is displaying the exact same feed. It's the only way to get consistent data.

It's not bullshots lol
 

REDRZA MWS

Member
woof at those cutbacks on Series S. BUT i think the console is doing exactly what its designed to do. Essentially run a current gen engine w/ needed cutbacks. update looks pretty nice IMO.
And MS had the foresight of letting people jump in to a new generation at a great price point, and there are still millions of games gaming on 1080p sets. Add gamepass and SS is a great value.
 

JackMcGunns

Member
that's still wrong

it's 55% and 59% per axis. (clarified when they talk about what Epic told them the average percentage of the Series S is)

the average resolution on PS5 is therefore
2112 x 1188, which is 2,509,056 pixels

the average resolution on Series X is
2265.6 x 1274.39, which is 2,887,257.984 pixels

the percentage of pixels rendered compared to a full 4K image is therefore actually 30.25% and 34.80% respectively

the percentage difference on average between the two then is that the Series X renders 115.1% as many pixels as the PS5,
or from the PS5's perspective, it renders 86.9% as many pixels as the Series X


Thanks for the clarification, I did the math assuming they scaled both axis, but my point still stands and what I was trying to explain all along, that it's not just a 4% difference in performance. Based on this, it's a 15.1% delta in favor of Series X.
 

Bogroll

Likes moldy games
I've got to say I watched my son play it on his Series S on 50" tv and I was impressed. I bit of pop in here and there when jumping out the plane but didn't see any on foot. Not saying there ain't none but if there is it's not obvious. Was surprised to here this goes to 540p as image looks decent for what it is.
 

Three

Member
They say XSS performs OK but I really disagree here.

- XSX outputs usually 3.5x more pixels than XSS
- But XSS completely lacks ray traced reflexions (basically has half-lumen), has less vegetation, has less shadows and has even lower quality GI.

It's worse than the difference seen in the Matrix demo where the only difference was resolution (often 4x more on XSX). Again it shows XSS hardware is a really badly designed hardware and performs really bad in UE5 as it's only 3 times less powerfull than XSX but performs way below that gap.

Usually you don't see that kind of performance degradation will less powerful hardware using the same tech. It's really odd how poorly that hardware performs in that compute heavy engine.

Agree with everything you mention but just to point out that the Matrix demo had missing light sources on XSS too.
 

Xdrive05

Member
I hope we get Fortnite like art style in other genres with Lumen and Nanite. 60fps cartoony graphics with RTGI, RTAO and no LOD pop-ins just makes for a wild presentation that is so pleasant to play in. Everything just feels so grounded which is even neater in a non-realistic art style. And it even plays well on lower-mid end systems to boot.
 

Bogroll

Likes moldy games
Agree with everything you mention but just to point out that the Matrix demo had missing light sources on XSS too.
You both make valid points but fail to point out at there lowest points 864p is not 3.5 times the resolution of 540p.
 

01011001

Banned
They say XSS performs OK but I really disagree here.

- XSX outputs usually 3.5x more pixels than XSS
- But XSS completely lacks ray traced reflexions (basically has half-lumen), has less vegetation, has less shadows and has even lower quality GI.

It's worse than the difference seen in the Matrix demo where the only difference was resolution (often 4x more on XSX). Again it shows XSS hardware is a really badly designed hardware and performs really bad in UE5 as it's only 3 times less powerfull than XSX but performs way below that gap.

Usually you don't see that kind of performance degradation will less powerful hardware using the same tech. It's really odd how poorly that hardware performs in that compute heavy engine.

864p = 1,327,104 pixels
540p = 518,400 pixels

so it's 2.56x on Series X if you take those numbers... I don't understand why you would and how you come to the conclusion that that means the Series S isn't running it well... like... what?

not only is the Series S (when you take these numbers) running a higher res than you would expect compared to the Series X, but it also has most features intact.
what happened here is Epic decided to pair back settings in order to get higher resolutions. which makes sense in a game where you shoot and track distant enemies with often no scope whatsoever.

they could most likely go all the way and make it so that the Series S runs at basically 33.3% of the Series X's resolution (424p on average), while keeping all the graphical features intact, but why would they if they think a cleaner image is more important?

they do use TSR, which is basically on par with FSR2, and that helps to clean up the image and bring back sharpness, but you can only stretch that scaler so far until the reconstruction algorithm doesn't work well anymore.

You both make valid points but fail to point out at there lowest points 864p is not 3.5 times the resolution of 540p.

yeah... and like I said above, why did he take these numbers in the first place?
according to Epic themselves the average resolution of these 2 systems are roughly 2265x1274 and 1401x788 respectively

2,885,610 pixels vs 1,103,988 pixels

...which is still basically the same difference, slightly higher, at 2.61x ... but the average is more telling than the lowest point possible (which is only there to even out the absolute worst case scenarios)
 
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i just got to play the game maxed out. i put everything up high, turned on RTX, and disabled the TSAA to render it natively at 1440p. it's definitely one of the best looking games out.

my cpu and gpu (9900K/RTX 4080) handled it with ease as as they ran at about 55/51C respectively and i was getting roughly 60-80fps. it stuttered a little but totally playable. if i was going to keep those settings i'd lock to 60fps to try even out the frame pacing but i'm going to enable TSAA again to get better FPS. with Balanced TSAA i was getting about 100-120fps which is better for me on a 144hz display.

what blew my mind was that the game was using up to 19.6GB RAM and 8.9GB VRAM. that for me puts it behind only Microsoft Flight Simulator in terms of how memory intensive it can be. Flight Sim i saw use about 24GB RAM at one point. if you're building a gaming PC then 32GB RAM is now a must if you want the best performance.

i'm happy with the performance i'm getting but i hope they re-enable DLSS and update it to DLSS 3 for the frame generation. we'll see.
 
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Mister Wolf

Member
I hope we get Fortnite like art style in other genres with Lumen and Nanite. 60fps cartoony graphics with RTGI, RTAO and no LOD pop-ins just makes for a wild presentation that is so pleasant to play in. Everything just feels so grounded which is even neater in a non-realistic art style. And it even plays well on lower-mid end systems to boot.

Dragon Quest XII would be a good candidate.
 
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