Important DirectX features now shipping with UDK include:
Tessellation and displacement;
Geometry shaders;
Multisampled textures; and
Shader Model 5.
High-end rendering features include:
Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing;
Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials, making character skin come alive;
Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before;
Deferred rendering with MSAA support;
Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh; and
High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment, such as shadows for point lights and other light sources.
NVIDIA’s APEX technology has also been integrated into the engine and ships with UDK.
Would LOVE the above to be in Unity We have some of the stuff already
But saying that I love that Unity is both Mac/PC, so I hope Apple’s update to OpenGL 3.2 with Lion helps!
Plus I’m not moving to UDK, Unity rocks workflow is ACE!!!
I want all of those. When Mac OS Lion gets released, I hope UT will have Unity 4.0 that has lots of awesome graphics features/overhauls that make use of open gl 3.2
What do you mean top two features are nice???
If Unity would ship with any of those two features, there would be 1000 posts long topic of whorshiping UT. I am just trying to say that you should be more realistic here. All added listed features in this upgrade are excellent, and what is more excellent is that Epic just adds kickass features in durring mid-updates, some of which are usually released in most engines in new versions (1 year lap or more).
Also a great update is totaly new terrain sculpting and painting system, which is similar to Zbrush painting.
Well there’s a long road ahead Unity to catch up cry and udk…at least they got foundation (ui/workflow) part right and that’s their no.1 selling point.
Also comparing realtime UDK version to Crysis is off value. Crysis runs 10 times better than UDK. If you take a look at sample scene that Epic released with new realtime UDK, it runs on three latest Nvidia graphic cards. Cryegnine can do it on 1.
Okay, so in other words, the top two features are nice? I mean, I don’t necessarily understand why you wrote that post as if it was an argument, I agree with you.
They are nice but nothing of immediate importance to Unity
Unity first needs any DX11 support at all and run deferred fine, it does not have the massive engine team behind like UDK which just “free fires what UE3 has” nor is unity as next gen as UE at the time nor can it be in the regular versions as long as OSX is not cut as OSX does not offer anything on that end and you won’t see the free or Pro versions of Unity differ that significantly between windows and osx at least I don’t suspect that happening.
I think its more reasonable to expect these upgrades to happen when OSX finally gets OpenGL 3.1+ support (OSX Lion at latest will introduce it, perhaps 10.6.7 might already do so as there were OpenGL 3.1 implementations present and then pulled again in past 10.6 dev releases)
Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before;
OSX 10.6 does only support OpenGL 2.1
The standardized hardware features on that generation are basically on en par with DX9, if at all (the 32bit per channel texture buffers are troublesome for example)
Although apple had implementations of 3.1 in the 10.6.3 dev builds prior release and some other versions they have pulled it over and over again, the only thing known at the time is that apple officially announced to support OpenGL 3.2 by OSX Lion aka 10.7
Until then, you will likely not see any SM4+ feature (geometry shader, tesselation, …) in Unity as its only available through hardware specific extensions if at all, not OpenGL standardized ones.
@eem: The MSAA on Deferred is another DX10+ feature. Its not Unitys fault that deferred doesn’t antialias, its a limitation in deferred on DX9.
The only thing UT could do is do the AA completely in shaders in the render pipeline (then it wouldn’t be true MSAA as in related and driver opted or controlled). But I personally doubt we are going to see that as the performance impact, with the current deferred render path performance, would raise the requirements to a level where it would become questionable if deferred makes any sense at all anymore for DX9 (we talk about something in the line of GTX260 / 280 as reasonable min requirement for fluent performance any longer) especially since forward rendering since 3.2 can also cast shadows from multiple sources and non-directional lights.
Considering the fact that the majority of the userbase for UDK consists of self-funded independent developers, the inclusion of high-end DX11 features is useless, they simply lack the talent necessary for taking advantage of those new features. It’s unnecessary fluff. Sure, it’s nice, but in all practicality, the majority of the userbase for UDK will be unable to leverage the features in a way that extends the graphical feature set of their game.
On the flipside, with such poor support for free 3D modeling applications, it’s amazing that anyone is able to get any 3D assets working inside the engine. The only applications with broad support are the ones that cost literally thousands of dollars to license, and who has that much money to throw at their artists?
So, one could take that statement and say that UDK promotes Piracy (as a result of it’s lack of support for free, mainstream development tools), and Unity promotes innovation and creative thinking (which is the result of taking advantage of the somewhat limited tools made available unto us).
I dunno, that’s just something that’s always bothered me about UDK.
You might be right about piracy part of UDK. However thats not their fault on purpose. They just support only top quality modeling software, and most of other engines is rotated towards max.
Dx11 isnt useless at all. It is nice to have it becouse it gives you piossibillity to learn and use it if you need it. Which part exactly do you think that it is too hard to developers to incoorporate in game? Tessallation? Creating tessalation preapared model isnt nothing different that normal mapped asset. All you need to do is to extract heightmap instead of normal. There is some playing in editor after that but nothing too hard.
We have some of the stuff already