Today Epic announced a system that can render a near unlimited number of micropolygons that will blow all other render engines out of the water - is there going to be an alternative solution coming to Unity?
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Good question. This new Unreal Tech is insaneâŚ
Considering there new pricing strategy and these new features, I really hope unity has something up their sleeve, I really like using unity but this demo really looked next-gen, and unity always has been catching up to unreal engine,well, the gap just increased by a lot for us, and even the new DOTS framework is far from being stable right now:(
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Yeah, they bought Bolt and then continued to charge for it!
Checkmate!
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Donât forget they also bumped the subscription prices ;D
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Yea i donât wanât to learn C++ xD Hope Unity catches up Unreal.
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I actually quite like C++, itâs just the UE4 API I find horrible.
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Also their global illumination realtime bounce lighting, lighting in Unity is slow and cumbersome and still not able to do as good a job as Unreal. Watching that tech vid is making me reconsider investing time and money into Unityâs HDRP systemâŚwhich is still miles off. Not too mention quixel megascans library would be handy 
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Please calm down and wait until testing the actual release in 2021. Do not run into every PR speaking. (At the same time that also applies to Unity.) But nevertheless:
Itâs true HDRP lacks a modern Realtime GI at the moment. Atleast there is a new branch on GitHub for a Screen Space GI approach for HDRP.
Also, Unity has access to the same hardware realtime raytracing tech as Epic has, so why not âŚ
But youâre right that Unity is slow and late regarding that point. But atleast they offered Enlighten for free since years when Unreal did not!
I donât see why Unity will be not able to render the exact same amount of polygons. I mean Unity already has heavy instancing with the Hybrid renderer, the tech is proved with the âMega Cityâ demo. Also the quality heavily depends on the assets. So with the same mega scans assets, you will probably achieve and equal look. But can you made them or pay for them yourselves? Unity already prove with âBook of the Deadâ that they can handle mega scans âŚ
Also megascans from âBook of the Deadâ are free to use. It was a study on a realistic forest. So yes, no fancy temple assets because it was not the demoâs theme.
Nevertheless, Unreal are tied to the same limits of user hardware and current state of art as any other game engine in the solar system, so please do not overreact. Fast react time and high quality bounce GI will require an expensive hardware setup. Probably Unity got access from Sony to the same API tech for PS5 as Epic already has âŚ
Unity rasied the subscription by 5$, probably they need money to invest in the high demanding user base requesting high quality features but at the same time, everybody is ranting about the higher asked price. But you know, features cannot be developed by air and love, they need money.
Obviously Epic has the money, for pumping everything into expensive scanned assets. Itâs because they charge you 5% of your earnings you know and they are lucky by milking Fortnite. So somebody has to pay for the costs of free high quality assets and overworked graphics and lighting developers. Are Unity devs willing to pay in order Unity can invest more? Probably most of the user base want to have many as free as possible âŚ
While I like the demo from Unreal 5, itâs nothing new. Already showed by the Uncharted series (Naughty Engine !) and Havok Physics (which you can also use in Unity). So they pushed the graphics, because PS5 can do with realtime raytracing cores and faster speed due to SSD, so what?
Sorry guys, some posts are just PR advertisement without any arguments. Are you even real developers capable of an argument based discussion?
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Regarding realtime GI, look at what just popped up on the HDRP repository:
More details on the implementation in this commit:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/commit/997cfabcb91c390a0387323816edc1b3bdb6b043
Seems like itâll be ready soon. But we have to see how much of an âinitial implementationâ it is
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They had a screenshot of the SSGI in the previous srp repo.
I do hope it handles bounce/ambient light better than that, and not just emissive light, but yeah this pic is most likely from a much earlier version. Or maybe the picture doesnât show it properly enough⌠but some of those darker areas look pitch black
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GI:
The unreal solution is an hybrid of voxel based tracing for large scale, distance field for medium scale and screen space for details, basically a combination of all technique they used so far (vxgi, distance field ambient and shadow, ssgi). According to the eurogamer interview that is. Unity would need some tooling to catch up, especially non rtx like updating and sign distance field.
Nanite:
Itâs probably using Geometry image as per the Brian Karis blog, which allow for virtualization in the form of sparse texture, so there is no (traditional vertice based) mesh, itâs images, and the eurogamer interview tells you itâs a SOFTWARE RASTERIZATION done in compute, unity wonât have that for a while because that mean changing the whole pipeline.
There is a lot we can infer from that, in how itâs done, it mean they probably unified the whole structure, as the voxel is probably octree used to serve the virtual paging, occlusion culling, GI, etc ⌠Ie each leaf contain a distance field and a geometric image.
For the rasterization they probably sort data as screen tile sorted front to back, which mean they can use the voxel octree to just serve a list of potential image geometric patch, then reading the geometric image, they can discard per pixel backfacing and frustum culling, and have a cache that keep track of tile coverage to stop patch processing when itâs fully covered on screen.
Mesh are automatically LOD by subsampling the geometric image, and since itâs using a virtual paging, only the right size of image is served at the right distance. Itâs also bypassing the inefficiency of small triangle per pixel that plague hardware rasterizer.
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Evidently notâŚapparently. I suppose anybody who dares to come into the Unity Forum to casually discuss issues can expect a near instantaneous snide, condescending reply. I guess all the issues we thought we were havingâŚlike terrain not having any detail shaders for grass/foliage or needing to buy 3rd party assets to have any chance at baking a complex light map under 12 hours, dont exist or we are just too amateur to understand that they arenât problems at all.
Your point about Mega-City and the future of ECS/DOTS and HDRPâs âpolyâ count limit is relevant, so is the SSGI âŚhowever none of these are as ready of production or stable as Unrealâs and a few people are getting tired/concerned that Unity will not be giving these the attention desired or that they may never eventuate at all. In which case, there will reach a point where no amount of store bought assets or subscriptions would beat Epics 5% type policy.
The irony of making a PR post in a forum where everybody clearly already likes and uses Unity over Unreal currently is pretty dense.
Did you have anything you wanted to discuss regarding Nanite/Unreal techâŚor did you just want to insult their user-base?
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That is quite interesting! I will have to check that out in more detail.
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Hmm yeah, but i donât think you can get much from a screen space technique
By production ready you mean YOU have already gone in production with Unreal 5 and PS5? I like to see your production ready result with that âŚ
I also like to see your not production ready result you got with Hybrid Rendering.
My problem is, when you blaming one engine and advertising another engine with no valid tech arguments is not casual talk. Users come here because they expect a discussion to get some value that is helping them with game development. What is then the point of the discussion? Spread some lies that Unity sucks? No way.
I highly doubt a constantly 5% fee is way cheaper than buying an Unity subscription. Also buying assets heavily depends on the studio and the skills of their team. You know there are a lot of skilled devs around that are capable of making their own features and assets. So unless you have a valid example of a game studio saved money from switching from Unity to Unreal. I cannot stand advertisement from Epic trying to lure devs into their fee policy. It can be a great financial risk.
You basically answered yourself. If they like their engine, they probably just be in their forum and just develop their games instead of making false comparisons on another game engineâs board. And yes, I did, by mentioning the arguments above.
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I think SSGI can work pretty well, but the main limitation being that if youâre in a room illuminated solely by a very bright emissive red neon sign, and you look away, suddenly thereâs no more light in the room. Probably best to use it in more evenly-lit scenes, or at least scenes that have actual lights and not just emissive materials
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You do realize Epic just changed the UE licensing to be 100% free for the first $1million in gross revenues for the title. After that you pay 5% for amount that goes over 1 mil. You need to have a really big hit to get to a point with this model where Unity is actually cheaper 
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As for SSGI, Unreal recently added this feature as well.