YouTube’s ‘Cycu1’ has shared a new interesting comparison video for the Fantasy Ruins Tech Demo of Unreal Engine 5. In this video, the YouTuber compares its UE5 version with and without Lumen/Ray Tracing. So, let’s take a closer look at it.
Unlike the Abandoned Warehouse Tech Demo, the Fantasy Ruins Demo looks much better with Lumen and Ray Tracing. In many scenes, the Lumen-powered version looks way better. Reflections, lighting, shadows, and other effects all improve with Lumen and Ray Tracing. Because of this, the demo looks less flat and more realistic.
However, this comparison also shows something we already knew. In terms of the performance/visuals ratio, pre-baked lighting is still the best. Yes, the UE5 version without Lumen doesn’t look as good, but it runs a lot better. In a game where the time of day doesn’t change, a rasterized game can look just as good as a ray-traced game.
But don’t get me wrong. Lumen and Ray Tracing can make games look better, especially when their time of day changes. These tools allow devs to create amazing graphics more easily. Making detailed scenes without RT takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why a lot of rasterized games look flat and bad. But with Lumen and Ray Tracing, even small indie game teams can make games with great visuals that punch above their weight.
In short, this is an interesting video. Now I know, some will only focus on the performance figures. And that’s fine. However, you should keep in mind that these performance figures are at Native 4K. With DLSS, this demo can run smoothly on high-end GPUs with Lumen/Ray Tracing.
Personally, I’d take the Lumen/Nanite version any time of the day. It looks better in every way, and it does not suffer from any reflection artifacts. And, since DLSS so damn good these days, you can get framerates higher than 60fps.
Speaking of Unreal Engine 5, you should also check out the following fan projects. For instance, you can find some faithful remasters of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3, which are super cool. A few months ago, we also shared an amazing remake of Toy Story 2. Then there’s this fantastic fan remake of STALKER that’s worth a look. Then there’s this fantastic fan remake of STALKER that’s worth a look. Oh, and don’t miss the Grand Theft Auto 6 fan concept in UE5; it’s pretty impressive. In February 2024, we also shared fan remakes of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and GTA 3, as well as an Uncharted fan game. We also have a fan remaster of Unreal Gold in UE5. You should also watch the full-on remake video for Final Fantasy 9, and this HD-2D Fan Remake for Xenogears.
Need for Speed Carbon and Tony Hawk’s Underground have also received some cool remakes. Oh, and there is a fan remake of Tomb Raider The Last Revelation, featuring Angelina Jolie and Christoph Walz. And if that’s not enough, there are fan remakes for Star Wars: Republic Commando, Death Stranding, Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s Solitude, Grand Theft Auto 4, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Fallout 4, Resident Evil 1, Skyrim’s Winterhold and Silent Hill 3’s Lakeside Amusement Park. There is also this Studio Ghibli stylized teaser for Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Unreal Engine 5. So, lots of UE5 fan remakes, right? Well, since they’re all really cool, we suggest giving them a watch.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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screw them both .path tracing is the king
The king of tanking your framerate.
What they really need to show is rasterisation vs Lumen vs RTX.
Lumen certainly looks better than legacy rasterisation but remember the garden area in CP2077 looking better than both with RTX. Of course rasterisation would fail completely if we had environment destruction thus I'd argue it's time to move on, indeed we have been for years now.
Devs don't do environment destruction anymore. It's all about the scripted moviegame and the map is just static background scenery for the movie.
Raytraced and lumen reflections are compatible with baked lighting in UE. The benefits of lumen, for lighting, are support for dynamic environments (time of day, physics & destruction, volumetrics etc) without potentially jarring quality inconsistencies, nice emissives, higher quality character lighting and developer iteration speed (instant feedback as opposed to having to wait minutes/hours for bakes to evaluate changes, not having to uv meshes for lightmaps).
5.4 saw a sizable (150%-200%) performance increase over 5.3 in most scenes, while improving visual quality. It would be interesting to see this in an engine version that isn't nearly 2 years old.
Yeah, John really should've mentioned that this was version 5.01 as mentioned in the video description. Having this take advantage of 5.4 would've indeed been interesting to see, especially the performance.
These are getting ridiculously bad.
A static scene, nothing moving, static time of day, lights not moving.
Pre-baked lighting looks the same as dynamic lighting.
Breaking at 11: water is wet.
Why even post this? Pre-baking has been known to developers for a long time, literally for decades, but it has its issues which is why it's not used in the majority of the titles.
the notion that using Lumen and Raytracing reduce the time of making scenes for devs and lessen the effort is completely irrelevant, nobody cares about the process or the effort, consumers care about the end product and the tangible end results. and using standard rasterization methods yields about 80% of fidelity without sacrificing a good chunk of frame-time. so for me it's art direction and fluidity and gameplay everytime.
Of course consumers care that the game looks good. If devs dont have it easy to light a scene in a realistic manner, then in many cases they simply will not do it (if the game is not static in terms of time of day, lights, scenery etc.). Once GI is mainstream, the traditional way of designing scenes in terms of visuals will be quite different compared to now where most games have to fallback on rasterized approaches.
Consumers care mostly about cost and if something takes longer and takes more effort to do then the game is going to cost more
Time is money
How to: Tank your FPS
for me the standard version looked like it had a better atmosphere, the realistic lighting doesn't always look better, only more realistic
That's completely subjective. Might as well say the 8-bit version has better atmosphere because it means the same thing.
Creating atmosphere requires a lot of deliberate work to match the lighting, colors, etc to the mood you want to set. With RT this is faster to do, and it's nothing but long term conditioning that you prefer the one that looks like all the games you've played before.
For a minute there I was wondering what the Hell had happened to John, but then I read that paragraph. I'm sorry, I'm just not ready to sacrifice visual clarity and FPS to Epic Games and NVIDIA and their stupid tech.
I also like the Lumen over the standard; performance be damned. I didn't complain when Crysis didn't run very well on the family computer. Instead I was stoked to see a game that took no prisoners, graphically speaking. Just because a game doesn't run all that well on current hardware doesn't make it a poorly made game. I wish all PC games were made from the ground up instead of being ports of console games.
Rasterized POS trash should die allready!
RT/PT is the Only way and much better for devs, as John stated!
The sooner we are rid of that old raster garbage, the better!
It's become subjective. Some will prefer Standard to Lumen (and vice versa), and others will like both Standard or Lumen, depending on the scene. Imagine that…art is subjective.
Those additional reflections do provide more realism and details.
Now why didn't we get this lighting as pre-baked previously ?
In games like trackmania (where you create your own tracks), made by 1 guy, the editor pre computes lighting.
And why we don't get it now, as 90% of games only need static lighting, and saving plenty of FPS ?
All this is telling me is SCREW 4k resolution.