Unity 5.0 switching to full deferred rendering instead of lighting pre-pass.

I don't have a link to the .pdf but someone linked it in another thread. It seems that with the switch to PBR for 5.0 Unity has also decided to switch from a LPP to a full on deferred renderer.

The switch makes sense and will bring some neat changes to scenes that have complex lighting arrangements.(Multiple overlaps in less draw calls)

I'm curious if anyone knows or is willing to share what implementation details are being considered. Is it going to use the Frostbite-style implementation, and if so is the new shader interface and threading optimizations meant to support the awesome parallel support that Frostbite has?

 

Frostbite 3 uses a tile based deferred shading system, which I believe UE4 uses something similar as well? (Could be wrong there). But it's just awesome anyway, so there's little reason not to use it..

Reason why we had to do it that way even from FB2 was PlayStation 3 SPU optimization. If Unity have not already considered it they seriously should..

 

** bad - boast. There's a very detailed article somewhere online detailing their implementation.

I'm mostly curious with how aggressive they plan on getting with all of the systems that touch their renderer. It would be a good time to look at their shadow implementation(PCF, PCSS) and since they are working on the job scheduler and the renderer it could also be a good time to look at a tile based shading system.

Crossing my fingers and hoping Aras or any of the graphic guys will share some knowledge.

http://s09.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/04-JAndersson-ParallelFrostbite-Siggraph09.pdf

I understand that most functionality needs to be useful cross-platform, but I believe any device that will support the bandwidth necessary for MRT's fat enough to do PBR will support a big leg up in parallelization.

 

Interesting move I wonder what the gains will be for Unity? Never got too familiar with Light prepass approach. When I built my hobby engine I went with a typical deferred rendering solution myself

 

As I understand it from publicly released information, Deferred is default with a fallback to Forward on request (presumably for mobile).

 

I hope that doesn't end like UE4 then.

Because UE4 is not be able to render good looking transparent materials. So if you want good looking water/glass with proper refractions and specular reflections, you have a hard time in UE4.

 

The reflections demo (Have you tried it?) looks great to me, puddles look awesome.

 

Yes I tried it and indeed it looks fantastic. But that was not my point.

All you see in this demo are opaque surfaces, including the puddles. The water materials in the default samples are all opaque for a reason.
Someone pointed out, that they even had to fake the water in the effects cave demo with two planes above each other.

At the moment Epic is not be able to render proper transparent surfaces, because of their deferred rendering technique. Epic is aware of that issue but there is no solution in the near future.

Some reads about the issue:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?679-UE4-Water-Shader

https://answers.unrealengine.com/qu...ionsspecularity-on-translucent-materials.html

https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...ls-don-t-look-that-good&highlight=transparent

edit:
Let me add. UE4's glass and water really doesn't look that great, if you look close enough

 

Ahhh well, it's not actually that hard to sort out.. We did either Emil perrson or just use multi-pass..

As Unity already has a forward rendering pipeline, it's not the end of the world.

 

Well for Epic's engine developers, it seems not that easy, reading their comments about that matter
.

 

They should hire some bosses from EA to watch over them, then anything is possible if you like having a job ..

 

Yeah maybe

I know I'm drifting from the original topic. But honestly, after playing quite a bit with UE4, the whole excitement wore off.
I could live with the stripped down svoi. But they also scrapped the true emissive materials and area lights. And there is more stuff that didn't impress me. I just won't write that all down.
All in all not much of graphical advantages over Unity, I would say.

 

I've said before with Enlighten and PowerVR, PBR shaders plastered throughout the pipeline I actually believe Unity 5 will have the leg up graphically.. Even if they switch to whatever deferred pipeline they wish. I don't know enough about how UE4 works (TBH I'm the same as you, I'm not that interested either), if they don't have a FR pipeline it would be VERY difficult to get around alpha blending and transparency issues. No matter which model you choose with deferred there are downsides to it..

Not trying to go off topic myself, the only leg up UE4 has is price and some of the AAA tools like matinee IMO..

 

I agree with that. I'm really eager to see what Unity5 really brings to the table. I don't care what rendering pipeline it uses, as long all material types look good.

...and the update speed and bug fixing. Something UT could learn from IMO.

 

Man....this things make me even more curious for another detail of unity5 rendering changes

 

Depth peeling for transparencies! All particle systems most now emit a "Made with Unity" quad every 401 particles...

Off the jump, the issues with draw calls impacting performance so heavily should be roughly halved since they'll likely move to a single pass implementation. It took a bit to get used to this as most engines tend to be fill rate bound. Presumably they'll just stick with a forward pass for transparencies.

 

Where can i download unity 5 trail

 

You can't - it's a private closed beta at the moment.

 

I did download it once but i forgot where i did download it it was also a Free Trail

 

You can't just download Unity 5, unless you pirate it, i think you meant Unity 4.5

 

You may be thinking of the other beta.

 

Oh the irony looks like UT took your advice

 

From what i read on a Beta thread , Android is slower and have a bigger size with UT5 compared to UT4.
Is this related to the new deffered renderer ?

 

A DR would have a higher fill rate, but Unity still has a FR path so they can just use that.