When Sony Made Optimized Realistic Graphics By Fixing UE4 | An Urgent Frame Analysis.

Summary

This video dives into the technical performance of *Days Gone*, analyzing how the game optimizes foliage rendering, lighting, and shadows to achieve high-quality visuals with a 1080p/60 FPS target on a 3060 GPU. The creator explains the game's use of prepass depth rendering, efficient screen-space shadows, and micro-detail encoding, highlighting the use of temporal accumulation and indirect lighting for realism. The video also discusses how *Days Gone* balances graphical fidelity with performance, offering key insights for developers to adopt similar optimization techniques in future projects.

Takeaways

• 🎮 'Days Gone' achieves 1080p 60 FPS on a desktop 3060 GPU using up to 67% GPU usage, showing impressive optimization.
• 🌳 The game uses dense, optimized foliage with subsurface scattering, enhancing realism without high GPU cost.
• 🖥️ Ben Studios modified Unreal Engine 4.11 heavily to improve performance and visual quality, creating a unique rendering pipeline.
• 🖌️ The game's temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) is weak, with motion blur and ghosting issues, but static frames remain clear and detailed.
• ⚡ A prepass depth rendering reduces unnecessary pixel shading, improving efficiency despite some overdraw trade-offs.
• 🌞 Non-screen space global illumination and dynamic shader techniques provide realistic lighting hints without heavy performance costs.
• 🪵 Foliage LODs are well-managed: close foliage uses high vertex density, distant foliage uses lower density to prevent overdraw.
• 💡 Temporal noise dithering improves visual stability at 60 FPS and reduces TAA dependency while maintaining image quality.
• 🔦 Screen space shadows and indirect lighting are optimized for performance, offering a balance between visual fidelity and efficiency.
• 🛠️ The video encourages developers to adopt similar optimization techniques, share shaders, and explore engine modifications for better graphics.
• 📊 Lessons from 'Days Gone' include the importance of geometric management, color grading, and indirect lighting for realistic presentation.
• 🚀 Upgrading to APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan and supporting async compute can provide additional performance headroom for next-gen visuals.

Q & A

What is the target hardware and performance for Days Gone in this analysis?

The target is 1080p resolution at 60 FPS on a desktop RTX 3060 12GB GPU, with a maximum GPU usage of 67% and a median frame budget of 8.9 milliseconds.

Which engine does Days Gone use and how was it modified?

Days Gone uses Unreal Engine 4.11, heavily modified by Bend Studio to optimize performance and visual fidelity for an open-world environment.

What is the purpose of the prepass in Days Gone's rendering pipeline?

The prepass renders only the depth of the scene, which is cheaper and prevents wasting performance on pixel shading behind closer geometry, though it can still double GPU cost due to repeated context processing in subsequent passes.

How does the second geometry pass contribute to visual quality?

It contains depth information for geometric microdetail, enabling cheap screen-space effects like SSAO and shadows, and allows stable imagery even without TAA.

How does Days Gone handle screen-space shadows differently from standard Unreal Engine pipelines?

The game uses a highly optimized three-pass approach for screen-space shadows, making them less dependent on TAA and temporal smearing, improving performance and stability.

What is unique about Days Gone's approach to foliage rendering?

Foliage uses a six-year-old subsurface scattering model and varies vertex detail based on distance from the camera, optimizing for performance while maintaining high visual fidelity close-up.

How does the game manage indirect lighting and non-screen-space GI?

It uses static environment information and shadow map cues to provide local bounce lighting across multiple frames, costing about 6 milliseconds, without the temporal smearing issues seen in some other techniques.

What insights does the video provide regarding temporal noise and order dithering?

Days Gone uses temporal noise with a subtly jittered order dithering pattern, which can cause flickering at 60 FPS, but limiting the jitter to two alternating positions can reduce perceptible artifacts.

What recommendations are provided for developers regarding shadows and lights?

Developers should focus on shadow fidelity and distance-based fading for lights, as overlapping shadows and distant lights are major performance considerations. Unreal Engine historically fades distant lights, which is suboptimal for performance and realism.

What are the key takeaways from Days Gone's graphics optimization?

Key takeaways include efficient foliage LOD management, optimized prepass and geometry passes, non-screen-space GI, temporal accumulation for effects independent of TAA, shadow management, and leveraging modern APIs for performance gains.

How can the lessons from Days Gone be applied to future game development?

Developers can adopt its techniques for efficient geometry and foliage management, decouple temporal accumulation from TAA, use non-screen-space GI for static environments, improve shadow handling, and leverage ray tracing or radiance-based GI for dynamic lighting.

What is the intended impact of sharing these insights according to the video?

The goal is to raise awareness in the industry about performance-optimized and visually high-fidelity techniques, encouraging developers to adopt better workflows and improve game graphics without sacrificing performance.