Unreal Engine 5 – What Could It Mean For Simracing?

Assetto Corsa Competizione, KartKraft, MotoGP20
In a way you might be right, although for atleast 2 of them I would say some debate would be at place :-p. All 3 have very clear issues due to the engine though.

What I am trying to say is, the Unreal Engine is just not a good fit for Sim Racing games, however good the developer is.
 
Yeah I saw this yesterday.. looks pretty great I must say. Racing titles in that engine could be phenomenal. ACC already looks amazing (although the framerate suffers) but I'm greedy for better, more realistic graphics. All in the name of immersion. Hopefully audio effects could take a leap forward too as I think that's something that could be hugely improved to great effect.
 
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At the moment? Nothing. ACC runs U4 and it runs so bad I want to puke. When lowering the settings it looks so bad I want to cry and the performance seems to be good, but somehow the frametime is choppy or so.

When I boot up AMS 2 with Madness Engine everything feels so smooth. It may not be the most beautiful sim, but it does it job great and the performance is outstanding. With Simracing you want performance -----> Eyecandy anyway.

Anyway U5 engine is great for a story-driven singleplayer game.. Not for racing. Perhaps for flysimming. However, Train Sim World uses U4 also, and it looks great, but the physics are so not the best.

I think Madness Engine is the engine for sim-racing to be at the moment. ISI-engine is old. U4 needs too much resources and doesn't run good. Ego-engine is also showing it's age.
 
"Graphics don't matter for sim racing" :rolleyes:

Yeah right. That's why AMS1 was the most popular sim, thanks to it's sublime physics. And nobody cares about SOL and Custom Shaders patch, because duh, the physics are still AC physics. ACC doesn't get extra attention due to how it looks. You're all kidding yourselves

UE4 doesn't fit sim racing that well, UE5 might be a different story. All you need is (relatively) better performance and sharper, affordable AA
 
"What do you think? What are you most excited about of these new technologies? Are you sceptical? Are you a modder? What do you make of it? Let us know, in the comments below! "

Just going to put 5000€ (I hope it is enough), prepared for buying a new PC, to be able to enjoy all this.
 
Not happening. CAD data is still too messy to put directly into the sim - there is way too much overlapping and non-matching of stuff like foliage, or when temporary stuff is getting in the way of key objects. Another reason is textures, yes you can photoscan the entire track but that will be counter the purpose even of the optimization of UE5, see they optimized polygon calculation so much to keep the amount of super-high-res maps to minumum, and that's what occupying the most of video memory. So you still have to map some shared textures around the track, and good luck doing that over CAD data. Still even time-consuming perspective, building "clean" models over CAD data is much more efficient. Yet. :)

TBH i would rather see how much FS2020 is capable for racing sims. It has much better sky & weather system and graphically that's what occupying 30% to 50% of screen space all the time in simracing. We don't need need the streamlining that much (although you can argue that it would allow avoiding modelling far away terrain and objects), but the majority of UE features we don't need anyway, stuff like interactive or breakable structures that change the lighting etc. We need very specific features instead, like rubber, dirt, marbles and skids buildup, very neutral and natural PP, optimization for big grids while having big physical fidelity etc. But the polycount & light calculation optimization in UE5 looks very very impressive.


It's way easier said than done, obviously, but I think that the savings in time of development and optimization could mean an easier way of getting better graphics, which is always a plus!
 
I like the idea of no LODs, being able to race in a large grid of 60+ with no slow down sound like a dream... but you probably still need a beefy PC.
 
Unreal Engine 5 – What Could It Mean For Simracing?

Even worse VR.

Yeah UE4 looks good, but the price paid is that you have to have an RTX 2080 Ti to get something like ACC to run properly in anything above 1080p in flat mode. As a result UE4 does not do VR well.

UE appears to be designed for the FPS on rails type of game, and from what I've seen it doesn't seem to do really do well in anything else unless it's relatively simple a'la Tekken or Soul Blade/Calibur.

It's easy to understand why devs want to use a "pre-cooked" game engine due to ease of implementation, and that approach can work well with the right kind of game. However I don't think UE fits to sim racing, at least not to the level that Kunos are pushing it.

Don't get me wrong I love ACC - it's the sim I spend by far most of my time in, but I can't help feeling that it's because I'm fortunate enough to have a top end gaming rig - i9 9900k plus RTX 2080 Ti, which kind of hides the issues presented by UE4 - except for the VR.
 
By the time Unreal 5 is commonly implemented into games, PC hardware has advanced already. 2080 ti will be mid-range. I have my doubts too (after several negative UE4 experiences), but UE4 running badly doesn't necessarily mean UE5 will run badly.

And size of games is going up anyway, been an ongoing trend for past 30 years. COD: Modern Warfare install takes already 180-190 GB depending on platform. Going up on each update. SSD sizes will go up too, and prices will go down
 
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Therefore this could translate, in our specific case, like for example a driving sim, powered by UE5, supporting mods, into modders being able to make their favourite cars without worrying too much about the number of polygons and LODs anymore.
I'm thinking first and foremost the biggest impact of this with a driving sim would be in regards to... the driving. No more LoDs. No more annoying pop-in. No more having to deal with reducing visible car counts.

Then secondly what that means for development, with small teams possibly being able to implement laserscan point clouds or CAD data of tracks and cars much faster and easier.

Only then would I be concerned about what that means for modding, if at all. Modders always find a way.

I do expect however that this will very heavily depend on streaming from NVMe SSDs, likely through PCIe 4.0 - still far from common on gaming PCs with only AMD offering appropriate hardware at the moment (I have a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and it's like one third of the throughput of what's touted for PS5 - no telling if this would heavily impact performance in fast paced driving games). Would be bold to make a niche game depending on this. Adoption of the hardware for this will take time.
 
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And size of games is going up anyway, been an ongoing trend for past 30 years. COD: Modern Warfare install takes already 180-190 GB depending on platform. Going up on each update. As texture fidelity goes up in the future towards 8K textures, it's inevitable
Which has been a problem for a lot of console players on the baseline consoles with 500 GB drives (one of many articles about it: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/call-of-duty-modern-warfares-file-size-is-getting-/1100-6476643/). And the PS5 will start at 825 GB, and the Series X at 1 TB. So if Unreal 5 will make games even bigger, baseline users might only be able to install 2-3 games at once. So that's gonna be a problem if they don't have an solution to that, and with only a few months before the next gen consoles launches, I'm not sure they have.

We also have a lot of people on poor connections, even with a stable 10 Mbps connection it would take several days to download at max speed. I'm lucky enough to have fiber for this to not be a problem, but some of the people I play with aren't, especially in countries with poorer infrastructure. We are also moving away from physical copies making it even harder for people with less than ideal connections to get games. I think hardware and software is evolving faster than what people and companies can upgrade their stuff. This is supercool, looks great and seams to run awesome, but we probably wont see the full potential of this for at least a few years. Selling games that a large amount of people can't even download or play without freeing up half of the storage on their consoles isn't profitable.

Just look at Unreal 4, games for sure didn't look like this 2013 or 2014 (except for maybe PT, but that was a really short playable techdemo):
Somewhere around 2017 it started to become that good-looking. I believe that it was part due to the game devs not knowing how to get the full potential out of Unreal 4, but also due to people not being able to download and play the games because of limitations in hardware.

Just my thought on it all :)
 
I'm thinking first and foremost the biggest impact of this with a driving sim would be in regards to... the driving. No more LoDs. No more annoying pop-in. No more having to deal with reducing visible car counts.

Then secondly what that means for development, with small teams possibly being able to implement laserscan point clouds or CAD data of tracks and cars much faster and easier.

Only then would I be concerned about what that means for modding, if at all. Modders always find a way.

I do expect however that this will very heavily depend on streaming from NVMe SSDs, likely through PCIe 4.0 - still far from common on gaming PCs with only AMD offering appropriate hardware at the moment (I have a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and it's like one third of the throughput of what's touted for PS5 - no telling if this would heavily impact performance in fast paced driving games). Would be bold to make a niche game depending on this.
It would be the ultimate irony for simmers if we get visual geometry for tracks more detailed than the mesh we race on.
I would wish for something like terrainserver to replace our sampled meshes+noise first.
But that doesn't sell games so.
 

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