Unreal Engine 4.11 just released

[CRIMSON_STRIDER]

dig the 4k textures

but better/great news...

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-11-released

Major Features

Performance and Multithreading

A major effort for us over the last several months has been optimizing UE4 in order to get our next game, Paragon, running at 60fps on PC and PlayStation 4.

Paragon offered a unique set of challenges to the team. In Paragon, we need to support animating 10 heroes and 120+ minions at a time, tons of FX, and all while rendering a beautiful, detailed map with long sightlines at 60fps. Paragon pushes the engine to its limits, especially when it comes to animation and rendering.

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Thousands of small optimizations throughout the engine have resulted in a big increase in performance for Paragon and should benefit all games built with UE4. Many of those optimizations are in 4.11, and more will be coming in future releases. Here are some of the larger optimizations we've been working on.

Parallelization. Multicore scaling is crucial to achieving high frame rates on modern PCs and consoles, so we have improved our threading architecture in several ways. We've reduced the cost of creating tasks, added support for high priority tasks, and removed many synchronization points.

Rendering performance. The renderer now does a better job balancing the size of its worker tasks and the command buffers generated for the GPU in order to achieve maximum parallelism without adding overhead on the GPU. We've also worked to remove synchronization points in the renderer so that we can better utilize all available cores.

Cloth simulation is now dramatically faster and makes better use of multi-threading. We now call the APEX solver directly for each asset from a worker thread. This allows for much better scheduling and eliminates many sync points and overhead. Clothing will now be updated after animation (when blending is not needed), otherwise after the skeletal mesh component updates.

Faster garbage collection. We now support garbage collection "clusters", which allows the engine to treat groups of objects as a single unit, drastically reducing the number of objects that need to be considered. Currently, only subobjects for Materials and Particle Systems are clustered. Additionally, the mark and destroy phases are more cache-coherent, resulting in a 9x reduction in time, and memory churn has been reduced during reachability analysis.

Multi-threaded animation. Animation Graph updates can now run on worker threads allowing the number of animated characters to scale with the number of cores. Check out the Upgrade Notes as we've deprecated many animation related APIs and there are limitations on which animation graphs can run in worker threads.

Instant animation variable access. We've added a 'fast-path' for variable access in the Animation Graph update. This allows us to simply copy parameters internally rather than executing Blueprint code. The compiler can currently optimize the following constructs: member variables, negated boolean member variables, and members of a nested structure.

Additive animation 'baking'. We now have an option to turn on baked additive animations. This makes using additive animations roughly3x faster. The work involved in calculating the delta pose for an additive animation is done at cook time rather than run time. This saves not only the calculation work involved in creating the additive deltas but also the memory accesses and allocations involved with decompressing the base animation which is no longer needed at runtime. This feature increases cook times, so you'll need to enable it by setting the cvar "a.UseBakedAdditiveAnimations" to 1. Future versions of the engine will rework animation cooking to avoid this cost and permanently enable this optimization.




New: Improved DirectX 12

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We've integrated updates to DirectX 12 in Unreal Engine from Microsoft to allow better CPU utilization while generating rendering commands in parallel; also added improvements like support for multiple root signatures, enabled asynchronous pipeline state disk cache by default, reduced memory footprint & fixed leaks, resource transitions optimizations, faster memory allocations and limited GPU starvation by flushing work during idle GPU time.

[iTraumatik]

now if only ark would update to this from their modded older version.

[plainclothespolice]

Originally posted by iTraumatik:

now if only ark would update to this from their modded older version.

From digest 28

When we'll reach beta and you will start optimizing the game, will you add multi-threading support?”

Quote

The game does currently use more than one thread, however there are more aspects of the gameplay which could be threaded, especially in later Unreal Engine 4 versions. As we head forward we’ll be continuing to pull in optimization related changes from later UE4, including more parallel threading systems.


Looks like they plan on implementing a lot of the optimizations, but it won't be for a (long) while.

[iTraumatik]

Originally posted by plainclothespolice:

Originally posted by iTraumatik:

now if only ark would update to this from their modded older version.

From digest 28

When we'll reach beta and you will start optimizing the game, will you add multi-threading support?”

Quote

The game does currently use more than one thread, however there are more aspects of the gameplay which could be threaded, especially in later Unreal Engine 4 versions. As we head forward we’ll be continuing to pull in optimization related changes from later UE4, including more parallel threading systems.


Looks like they plan on implementing a lot of the optimizations, but it won't be for a (long) while.

Yep, i knew about them "pulling in" stuff but why not just update and have the full benefit of all the new renderers and processing..... Would take more time but instead of updates every 2 weeks i would wait a couple of months for it. Or have a beta branch to port to if they want to keep up with adding content to main branch.

[MrAlucardDante]

I wish they update UE4, there is so much functionnality in the latest version (which is now 4.12) that would allow ARK to run smoothly like :

Originally posted by Unreal Engine patch notes:

NEW: NETWORK REPLICATION OPTIMIZATIONS

We have added a new feature we call adaptive network update frequency that can save CPU cycles that would normally be wasted in redundant attempts to replicate an actor when nothing is really changing. The system will learn how often properties are changing on an actor and dynamically adapt the actor’s network update frequency over time.

Using this new feature can result in massive replication performance improvement!

[SireDragonChester]

Ya they need update UE4 engine.. I want see Vulkan API added :)

[MrAlucardDante]

Originally posted by Sire CentaurChester:

Ya they need update UE4 engine.. I want see Vulkan API added :)

Yeah me too. Last time I've checked, the Ark Dev Kit is based on 4.5, so there is a lot to add. Hopefully, the Center map is developped on 4.12

[SireDragonChester]

I think explains why Ark is so buggy and performance is so bad.. Even on my GTX 980ti SC.. Which shouldn't struggle to stay above 30 FPS at my base..

I know as patchs comes.. It slowly gets better but ya they should update :)

[MrAlucardDante]

Originally posted by Sire CentaurChester:

I think explains why Ark is so buggy and performance is so bad.. Even on my GTX 980ti SC.. Which shouldn't struggle to stay above 30 FPS at my base..

I know as patchs comes.. It slowly gets better but ya they should update :)

Lucky you, a 980ti

My 760 SLI is useless to me, ARK lacks multi-gpu support

I'm still able to get 25-30 fps outdoor and 45-60 fps inside my house on medium settings with high textures. But I experience major lags when I load a huge or very crowded zone.

Look for arkenhancer, if it still exists. Mayeb it can help tweaks your settings

[Black Boots]

I have played a little with SLI on my 2x 970 setup at both 1080p and 1440p and there is an increase in FPS with both cards running. IMO it's not something I would go out and buy an extra card for, but it is noticeable.

https://youtu.be/zOyZHI89YR4

[David Kolář]

Updating the engine is not just downloading new version and rebuild whole project. That can means months of work for one developer to adopt code to newer version and that even does only mean to "make it work" not use all new features. Updating UE can help a little in rendering performance, but few percents tops. To truly use power of all new tweaks and features of newer UE version you usually need to rework your game to new methods that were implemented in newer version. Otherwise it can't benefit from those updates. It really not works that it will just magically start to work better on newer version.

And there is also dilema - focus on creating new content or reworking old content to work on newer version? UE makes new version every month or so, updating engine every time would mostly lead to only updating old stuff and no time to create anything new.

[MrAlucardDante]

Originally posted by Black Boots:

I have played a little with SLI on my 2x 970 setup at both 1080p and 1440p and there is an increase in FPS with both cards running. IMO it's not something I would go out and buy an extra card for, but it is noticeable.

https://youtu.be/zOyZHI89YR4

Do you have a monitoring software (MSI Afterburner, ASUS GPUTweak, etc) ?

When I open Afterburner, I can clearly see my first card getting hotter and with higher frenquency, my second one stays at idle all the time.

I've even added both version of the exe (w or w/o battleye) to the nvidia control panel.

[MrAlucardDante]

Originally posted by David Kolář:

Updating the engine is not just downloading new version and rebuild whole project. That can means months of work for one developer to adopt code to newer version and that even does only mean to "make it work" not use all new features. Updating UE can help a little in rendering performance, but few percents tops. To truly use power of all new tweaks and features of newer UE version you usually need to rework your game to new methods that were implemented in newer version. Otherwise it can't benefit from those updates. It really not works that it will just magically start to work better on newer version.

And there is also dilema - focus on creating new content or reworking old content to work on newer version? UE makes new version every month or so, updating engine every time would mostly lead to only updating old stuff and no time to create anything new.

To use the new feature, of course you have to implement them. We won't see these things until ARK enters in the beta phase.

But since ARK is based on UE 4.5.1 and the last version is 4.12.5, they can update without it crashing the project and get all the patches that were made to UE.

Upgrading from UE3 to UE4 needs some rework, but not from UE4.x to UE4.y.

[David Kolář]

Originally posted by AlucardDante.fr:

Originally posted by David Kolář:

Updating the engine is not just downloading new version and rebuild whole project. That can means months of work for one developer to adopt code to newer version and that even does only mean to "make it work" not use all new features. Updating UE can help a little in rendering performance, but few percents tops. To truly use power of all new tweaks and features of newer UE version you usually need to rework your game to new methods that were implemented in newer version. Otherwise it can't benefit from those updates. It really not works that it will just magically start to work better on newer version.

And there is also dilema - focus on creating new content or reworking old content to work on newer version? UE makes new version every month or so, updating engine every time would mostly lead to only updating old stuff and no time to create anything new.

To use the new feature, of course you have to implement them. We won't see these things until ARK enters in the beta phase.

But since ARK is based on UE 4.5.1 and the last version is 4.12.5, they can update without it crashing the project and get all the patches that were made to UE.

Upgrading from UE3 to UE4 needs some rework, but not from UE4.x to UE4.y.

That might be true in some cases, but not in case of ARK. It also is not based on "4.5.1", it uses its own build of UE, with custom tweaks (changed source code). Updating the engine would mean to merge UE source sode commits with their own changes in UE source codes. Also they already pulled some changes even from UE 4.11 into ther custom engine build. So at this moment it is hybrid which may be based on some older UE4 release, but has custom tweaks and important (relevant) commits from newer versions too.

[MrAlucardDante]

Originally posted by David Kolář:

Originally posted by AlucardDante.fr:

To use the new feature, of course you have to implement them. We won't see these things until ARK enters in the beta phase.

But since ARK is based on UE 4.5.1 and the last version is 4.12.5, they can update without it crashing the project and get all the patches that were made to UE.

Upgrading from UE3 to UE4 needs some rework, but not from UE4.x to UE4.y.

That might be true in some cases, but not in case of ARK. It also is not based on "4.5.1", it uses its own build of UE, with custom tweaks (changed source code). Updating the engine would mean to merge UE source sode commits with their own changes in UE source codes. Also they already pulled some changes even from UE 4.11 into ther custom engine build. So at this moment it is hybrid which may be based on some older UE4 release, but has custom tweaks and important (relevant) commits from newer versions too.

Ok thanks for clarifying things up

[Black Boots]

Originally posted by AlucardDante.fr:

Originally posted by Black Boots:

I have played a little with SLI on my 2x 970 setup at both 1080p and 1440p and there is an increase in FPS with both cards running. IMO it's not something I would go out and buy an extra card for, but it is noticeable.

https://youtu.be/zOyZHI89YR4

Do you have a monitoring software (MSI Afterburner, ASUS GPUTweak, etc) ?

When I open Afterburner, I can clearly see my first card getting hotter and with higher frenquency, my second one stays at idle all the time.

I've even added both version of the exe (w or w/o battleye) to the nvidia control panel.

I had to use a profile that I found for Dark Souls and installed it with Nvidia Inspector. I'll have a link to the profile I used in the next vid which I have set to come out on Sunday. But I can't get to it right now, on holidays on roaming data.