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Cinema-Quality Unity Engine 'Adam' Demo Claims To Run Real-Time On GeForce GTX 980 (hothardware.com)

Posted by timothy on from the leadering-to-better-graphics dept.

MojoKid writes: This week at GDC 2016 the team at Unity revealed their stable release of the Unity 5.3.4 game engine along with a beta of Unity 5.4. There are a number of upgrades included with Unity 5.4 including in-editor artist workflow improvements, VR rendering pipeline optimizations, improved multithreaded rendering, customizable particles which can use Light Probe Proxy Volumes (LPPV) to add more realistic lighting models and the ability to drop in textures from tools like Quixel DDo Painter. But for a jaw-dropping look at what's possible with the Unity 5.4 engine, check out the short film "Adam" that Unity has developed to demo it. The film showcases all of Unity Engine 5.4's effects and gives a great look at what to expect from Unity-based games coming in 2016. Unity will showcase the full film at Unite Europe 2016 in Amsterdam. But what's most impressive about Adam perhaps is that Unity says that this is all being run in real-time at 1440p resolution on just an upper-midrange GeForce GTX 980 card.

59 comments

  1. Whatever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is nowhere near cinema quality. The textures aren't all that great and the lighting needs work.

    Also note how they used robots exclusively because plastic and metal is easy to do. I'd like to see them try making a realistic looking human or animal.

    1. Re:Whatever by Junta · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's interesting that it's at the point where you probably have to actually have some experience working in the field to spot the 'cheats' going on compared to realtime. Things have come very far and it looks very impressive. The quality of the cheats have just gotten crazy over time.

      No indirect lighting, no indirect lighting, no caustics, no hair/fur. Lot's of places where the lighting looks complex, but can be baked into the textures. Very carefully set to avoid those being noticable omissions/limitations.

      All the shader work going on is pretty impressive.

      The Unity demoes finally look to be even with the Unreal demoes.

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    2. Re:Whatever by mwvdlee · · Score: 2

      You should watch Toy Story 1 again and be surprised by how dramatically graphics, both realtime and cinematic, have improved.

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    3. Re:Whatever by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      Unity still has a way to go to catch up with Unreal Engine in terms of impressive demos. That real-time mo-cap fed straight into real-time rendering live on stage at GDC was bloody impressive in several technical areas.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    4. Re:Whatever by Junta · · Score: 1

      Oh, I'm very keenly aware and have recently seen it (which had the same things avoided that realtime rendered scenes avoid today). It would be silly to claim realtime can't best Toy story. The fastest supercomputer in the world the month Toy story came out would be bested by a single quad-core Haswell 3.0 ghz (though only barely). However as the pre-rendered cinematic have been able to start featuring more and more of the things they had to originally skip, realtime hasn't been able to do the same for everything (physics/geometry are straightforward in the relationship, but advanced lighting phenomena are just not in the cards for rasterization, good news being it's generally the lighting effects people don't notice unless they are looking for them explicitly).

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    5. Re:Whatever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Much of the indirect lighting is baked in a sense, but not into the textures, a light probe is set up to capture scene lighting and then apply it to a given space or area. Essentially as a light probe. You can interpolate between them so some animation is possible. It's actually a pretty cool flexible system from a artists standpoint. The shading is all done as BRDF (or similar) now. It's an insanely flexible.

      The tools available now are mind blowing, I set a game demo in 3 days with 3 other art guys with 0 game dev experience and only one with programming experience and got together a demo that was enough to to get serious cash backing.

    6. Re:Whatever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That sounds essentially like a lightgrid, only not as automatic.

    7. Re:Whatever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The movement feels like it is lagging a bit and not quite following the mo-cap. If the Adam sequence is rendered in real time on a GTX 980 then I find it be more impressive then the Unreal one... :\

    8. Re:Whatever by JohnStock · · Score: 1

      You're comparing apples with oranges. Both are equally impressive and cutting edge as each other.

    9. Re:Whatever by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      Except that the Unity demo is not cutting edge in any way.

  2. GeForce 980 as upper mid range? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    >GeForce 980
    >Upper-mid range

    1. Re:GeForce 980 as upper mid range? by minasoko · · Score: 1

      It's accurate. The GPUs in the discrete Maxwell family are, from lowest to highest performing; GM107, GM206, GM204 and GM200. The GTX 980 uses the GM204 part.

  3. Looks good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Good artistic impression.

  4. This is pretty impressive by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Especially considering that we're not talking about an engine with a price tag that makes AAA studios stagger. This is affordable, high quality rendering.

    One of the last big strongholds of AAA gaming, i.e. high speed, high quality graphics, is coming to an end. Certainly we won't see everyone who happens to have an idea for a game to crank out something over the weekend that dethrones the next clone in the Battlefield series, but this could well mean we're heading to a time when "indie games" are no longer games that have to convince with their content, wit or charm because they can't simply blow us down with effects.

    Hmm.

    I don't know... should I welcome this or mourn it?

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    1. Re:This is pretty impressive by Junta · · Score: 3, Informative

      Though the engines are capable, it still takes a great deal of work to actually bring out those capabilitiies. You still need laborious modeling and texturing work if you want something 'AAA' and can't just assemble things out of stock content from the asset stores.

      Titles developed on a budget have not come remotely close to the aspirational demos of the engines they have used to date, and I wouldn't expect that to change anytime soon.

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    2. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No it isn't. Pre-baked lighting, very slow camera movements, and nothing to render in the background. It's smoke and mirrors from the shitty Unity engine that makes fast PCs and consoles run like shit. Give a mouse/controller camera control and watch the misleading engine demo fall to pieces.

      Anyone with more than 10 minutes experience of game engines can spot how much cheating is going on, and how contrived this "demo" actually is. You're on /. you should know better. So you're a shill, rumbled!

    3. Re:This is pretty impressive by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      Or maybe someone who plays games rather than write them?

      But you seem to know a thing or two, elaborate.

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    4. Re:This is pretty impressive by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      Sure, but from what I see there it seems the limiting factor for whether or not you get a good game off the ground shifts more and more towards modelling, texturing and general the "artsy" parts rather than programming and optimization.

      Which I'd consider a good thing. That's after all what the user gets to see in the end and that's where the time and money should go.

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    5. Re:This is pretty impressive by mikael · · Score: 1

      Some game companies now have only a 10 or so programmers for the graphics, AI and gameplay, while there will be over 500 3D modelers, texture artists, concept artists, testing. What you put in is what you get out in terms of artwork in terms of detail, texture layers going all the way up to normal and displacement maps.

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    6. Re:This is pretty impressive by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      It's partly that, and it's partly just the fact that commodity game development hardware has simply gotten that insanely good. These game engines all use the exact same low-level APIs and hardware. There's nothing inherently special about one rendering engine vs another other, despite what they'd have you believe.

      Interestingly enough, contrary to what most users believe, the runtime rendering engine is actually a surprisingly small part of what a game engine does. A game engine's most important feature is probably the tools and general asset pipeline - the ability to import, convert, and control game assets in an efficient matter. Plus, there are dozens of other critical tools and runtime subsystems, without any of which a game is simply not happening. But it's a lot sexier to talk about the rendering engine, because that's what users see, I suppose. Typical users or the press would go to sleep if you prattle on about your efficient asset production pipeline.

      Also, among the reasons cinematics (even if real-time rendered) can look so much better when specifically targeted like this:
      * No worries about scaling assets down for lower-end GPUs and CPUs, which requires overhead even on higher-end machines
      * No worries about pesky things like physics, collision, pathfinding, AI, and all other gameplay code... just animation, rendering, and audio
      * Occlusion, LODs, and visuals for both models and environments can be pre-baked. It's a lot harder to do this in real-time, since generally the camera can point anywhere at any time, and many games support different times of day, weather environments, etc.

      I don't mean to pooh-pooh the film. It looked nice, but I'd be a little surprised if GDC attendees, at least the professional devs, were "wowed". It sounds more like the press and fans were wowed, which was really the point. Professionals, while they enjoy eye candy and rendering tricks as much as anyone, know there's a hell of a lot more to making a game than creating a cinematic demo.

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    7. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I've seen more impressive graphics in demoscene releases than in most AAA games.

    8. Re:This is pretty impressive by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      That's not quite true: Sure there are fewer programmers working on adapting the actual engine, since few game studios create their own engines now. But, you have more programmers in the art department instead, programming/optimizing shaders, particle systems etc

    9. Re:This is pretty impressive by Khyber · · Score: 1

      I play and write games (I'm still working on a 2D Second Life and we're almost in Beta.)

      Unity is crap. 2D pixel games which would've run fine on a 300 MHz Windows 98-era computer need something like 2.4 GHz C2D just to freaking operate at a measly 30 FPS *MINIMUM* Simple 3D demos are insanely bloated.

      Even the BYOND engine does better than this.

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    10. Re:This is pretty impressive by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Also, among the reasons cinematics (even if real-time rendered) can look so much better when specifically targeted like this:

      Moreover all of the animation, camera work, story board is a custom job from start to finish. What I most saw from the short movie was the animation was exquisitely detailed (although perhaps this is common now in video game cutscenes) but try to make it a Quake clone with a human player walking around in the middle of that scene with the cyborg and none of that will work. What if you're blocking the passage or poking him with an axe or whatever else. Well you can't do that.

    11. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But, you have more programmers in the art department instead, programming/optimizing shaders, particle systems etc

      Those aren't programmers, they're artists.

    12. Re:This is pretty impressive by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      So, working in C/C++, interfacing directly with graphics API's, drivers and the renderer, programming complex shaders to simulate physical attributes in the fastest way possible, is not programming? Just because they work together with the art director and the animators?

    13. Re:This is pretty impressive by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      True, but animation in realtime cutscenes is pretty much all mo-capped custom animations these days, and the player is typically not interacting with the game while the cutscene is running. So, I think doing custom animation work is not really "cheating", per-se. Some games, including ones I worked on, used to do really horrible cutscenes (by today's standards) using scripts that direct characters around using pre-set animations, but no AAA games do that these days, thank goodness.

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    14. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So, working in C/C++, interfacing directly with graphics API's, drivers and the renderer

      That isn't what you said. And I quote:

      Sure there are fewer programmers working on adapting the actual engine, since few game studios create their own engines now. But, you have more programmers in the art department instead, programming/optimizing shaders, particle systems etc

      Creating shaders isn't programming. In fact, these days it's all done in a WYSIWYG interface. Particle effects are done mostly with WYSIWYG interfaces also, but even when they are done manually, it will be an artist creating them. A programmer handles the glue logic between the engine and the driver and the particle generators in the engine, they would not know what looks correct or aesthetically pleasing when it comes to creating the actual visuals, which includes shader and particle effects. If they are working on the subsystems themselves, they are working on (or adapting, in your term) the engine and not working in the art department.

      As a game artist myself, I speak from experience. I've working with fixed function shaders and effect runners (particle effects) in the old id Tech engines, up to modern day pixel shader and particle effects. Unless you want "programmer art", you let your art team handle that stuff.

    15. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You say this as if it's something new. It's always been the "artsy" part. Pixel art games can look incredible despite technologically speaking being very limited in their needs. Yet even so, due to "artsy" reasons, they can also look like crap. It's all about how an artist uses their medium and how they exploit/hide limitations of the system.

    16. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For example, look at the system requirements for a game like TIS-100...

    17. Re:This is pretty impressive by Goragoth · · Score: 1

      Not all shaders are created with WYSIWYG interfaces (in fact Unity doesn't even ship with a graphical material editor, though there are 3rd party assets that add this feature). Still, for very complex effects sometimes there is no other way than to go in and code it in HLSL/CG/GLSL or whatever. Whether that is creating art or programming is a whole different question, people specialized in the field are usually referred to as "technical artists" as it is a bit of both. You simply aren't going to create a compute shader to simulate fluid dynamics using some node-based visual editor for instance.

    18. Re:This is pretty impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Still, for very complex effects sometimes there is no other way than to go in and code it in HLSL/CG/GLSL or whatever.

      Which is exactly what artists can do and have done for years, except it's not "coding" and nowadays there is nothing you can't do in a visual editor.

      You simply aren't going to create a compute shader to simulate fluid dynamics using some node-based visual editor for instance.

      Deform vertexes and fluids are actually done in a visual editor.

  5. GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Cowclops · · Score: 4, Informative

    The GTX 980 is not an upper midrange card. Its $500 and about the only thing faster is a GTX 980 TI. I know it sounds like a big deal for it to run well on a so-called midrange card, but if they wanted to do that they'd need to try it out on a GTX 950 or 960.

    If I were the dictator of "video card performance nomenclature," it would be more like this:

    GTX 950 - Midrange
    GTX 960 - Upper Midrange
    GTX 970 - Entry level High End
    GTX 980 - High End
    GTX 980ti - Cost No Object.

    If a video card costs about what the average person spends on a whole computer these days, the phrase "midrange" does not get to be associated with it.

    1. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Junta · · Score: 1

      There's also 'Titan-X'. So there's a a very very high ceiling.

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    2. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Cowclops · · Score: 1

      Oh yeah, i forgot about the Titan-X. Thats more expensive, but its not really any faster than a 980 ti, it just has more GPU memory. Which is definitely something to put it even higher end, but at the end of the day they're basically both "I have money and want to be parted with it" solutions.

      I'd get a GTX 970 if i were in the market for a GPU, but I don't play enough brand new games to warrant upgrading currently.

    3. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by kav2k · · Score: 1

      Not to mention that multi-GPU configs are probably included in the calculation of the "range".

    4. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Cowclops · · Score: 1

      Well, if 2 980 tis are higher end than one 980 ti... three 980 tis are higher end than 2. If you just start stacking more of the same thing, its certainly a more high end overall solution, but it doesn't make the product that comprises that solution more high end. A Porsche 911 GT3 is a high end car, but a Bugatti Veyron costs more. The fact that you can always find something even more expensive to throw your money at doesn't mean that anything that was previously high end is now midrange. Of course, I don't actually intend to dictate what people call high end or not and even my own suggestion only means anything at this precise moment in time. Something like an Nvidia 8800 ultra used to be high end, but now is irrelevant since its so old and it barely keeps up with Intel integrated graphics.

    5. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by waTeim · · Score: 1

      The 980 is probably best for neural networks in terms $ for capability while Titan-X has more memory but requires additional extra money. Google's Deep Dreams runs 100x faster than CPU NN, but for video it runs out of memory for anything over HD. Not sure if Titan-X can do 4K. Supposedly both of them get blown away by the new stuff this year. Another benchmark, but not completely disconnected to games.

    6. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      I picked up a HP gaming PC with 980Ti and 4790K last year for $950... That's the price of a low-end Surface Pro or high-end iPad.

      These days the "high end" gamers are running SLI/Crossfire, and the "cost no object" ones have Triple- and Quad-GPU rigs with PCI-e SSDs, 1.5KW PSUs, water cooling, etc.

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    7. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I picked up a HP gaming PC with 980Ti and 4790K last year for $950... That's the price of a low-end Surface Pro or high-end iPad.

      A low-end Surface Pro 3 is under $600. An iPad Pro is about $850.

    8. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Money can't buy everything. Triple/Quad GPU is dumb and dual is debatable, you get more and more stuttering and high latency. Or idle GPUs with incompatible games.

      You must have had some crazy fire sale price : cost of 980 Ti and 4790K add up to more than $950 on their own.

    9. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dual GPU is great for running games under a VM or if you want to dedicate one to physics.

    10. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by delt0r · · Score: 1

      titans are more about CUDA performance than graphics. They aren't really any better than the GTX when it comes to games.

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    11. Re:GTX 980 is not "upper midrange" by felipou · · Score: 1

      Where did you get that deal? (honest question!)

      Last time I looked, just the CPU and GPU together cost almost $950.

      (CPU for $320 on newegg and amazon, and GPU $600 cheapest one on amazon)

  6. Ever Since Doom... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...Game makers have been putting out stuff that exceeds the capabilities of your average person's rig. Just as you can afford to make a two year old game run decently, they come out with something that costs another $3k and requires the latest processors.

    So...how much will a rig that can use this set someone back?

    1. Re: Ever Since Doom... by stevedog · · Score: 1

      This is running on the 980, nvidia's current high-end consumer card. When Pascal, the next gen of nvidia's cards comes out, I would expect their midrange card, the 1060 or at least the 1070 (the budget-highend), to be able to run it. So, in 6 months, $800-$1k.

      That being said, as others have pointed out, the scene is also very custom-built to create the sense of effects that would require much more power if you could actually look around at will, so it's not exactly apples-to-apples with real games.

    2. Re: Ever Since Doom... by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Even with the high-priced 980 you should be able to build something for under $1K. The next most expensive stuff is the CPU (non overclockable Core i5), then the rest is cheap : low end motherboard, 8 gigs of memory, power supply (high quality 400 watt or good 450/460 watt)

      Still, that's $1K to play a few games. A 10-year-old PC with maxed out RAM does most of the other things to do with a PC nowadays.

    3. Re: Ever Since Doom... by JDeane · · Score: 1

      I just upgraded to an i5 and GTX 980 from a Core 2 Duo and for my situation it was totally worth it. I can now play emulated GameCube and PS2 games with no cheats and higher resolutions and graphics options turned on. (I could play them before on ye olde C2D but I had to turn everything down and sometimes they ended up looking worse than the original.)

      Most new games are so boring.

      I do like The Witcher 3 though....

      On the main topic, that demo looks pretty cool. I don't think it looks like a movie at all but for real time game play it looks great.

  7. Where's the real-time global illumination? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    They really should focus on support for dynamic global illumination. Real-time GI does ten times more in terms of creating atmosphere than any localized shader effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHbHOQ1NRuw

    1. Re:Where's the real-time global illumination? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you seen this one?

  8. Quality? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Meh, no one specified the quality of the cinema.

  9. Unity engine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now go peruse the Unity community forums...in the "Announcements" category.

    Marvel at the number of posts complaining about the instability of EVERY Unity release. Every.Single.Time.

    I'm not being a troll, go look at it for yourself. Seriously folks it's a wonder those guys are still in business.

  10. Not that impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You guys know Doom 3 came out what, like 10 years ago? With basically the same graphics. Unity has great marketing, to be sure - shooting this video with a "hand-held" camera effect makes it look much less like a cutscene and more like reality. but you can do that with any engine, and it always makes things look more real.

    Nothing but camera tricks and "decent" graphics.

    Am I excited for the new engine? Yes. Am I horrified that people are unable to think critically? No more than usual.

    1. Re:Not that impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, the assets in Doom 3 weren't as detailed. id Tech 4 could certainly handle much more detailed models and textures, so you could probably get pretty close to the Adam demo visually though. The drawback would be the lighting system in id Tech 4, which doesn't allow for soft shadows or radiosity, but those could be faked to an extent at the expense of a lot of manual work tweaking textures/shaders/decals. For a short, non-interactive demo it might not be so bad, but you really would not want to have to do this for an entire game.

      Some of the modified id tech 4 engines might be able to pull it off more easily though, but I don't have much experience with those.

  11. video without motion compression by short · · Score: 1

    All the HQ-graphics video increase their resolution but if one stops the video each frame is ugly because of the lossy inter-frame motion compression. They do not show anything spectacular crippling it in the final delivery stage. Although I do not know what format to choose myself, MJPEG is too big, maybe some MP4/VP9 can tune the motion compression impact.

  12. It's blurry by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

    Two things I dislike are all of these blurry effects and going overboard with bloom. In my view it isn't "cinematic" and doesn't make scenes look better. It is just plain annoying.

  13. GTX 980 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I see the link to the unity beta engine, but where is the link to the demo (not the video) so I can run it?