The recent analysis of the demo Matrix: The Awakening in Unreal Engine 5, carried out by Digital Foundry, shed light on an interesting aspect, which has been debated at length in recent months regarding the next gen, namely theimportance of an Super-fast SSD for optimal use of the new Epic Games graphics engine.
It must be said that the same Epic Games he repeated several times the need for very fast access to the archive in order to obtain the results seen in the first demo of the engine.
The famous “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo seemed like it could only be possible with a super-fast SSD like that of PS5, which, moreover, was recently reported in the first presentation of Matrix: The Awakening, which as we have seen was developed in collaboration by Epic Games with The Coalition.
The general idea was that the fast transition moments on scenarios built on Unreal Engine 5 required extreme SSD speed in order to perform at their best, but this does not seem to match what was reported by Michal Valient, Director of Platform and Rendering Engineering of Epic Games who worked on the demo of Matrix, consulted by Digital Foundry with the recent analysis on the demo in question.
When asked whether the performance reductions in the fastest passages are to be referred to I / O (input / output) problems, i.e. data transmission and management from the archive, Valient explained that this is not the case: “The bottleneck, the uncertainties you see, are not related to the I / O, the I / O of these machines is very valid. We still have problems to fix with regards to data initialization, “he explained.
In truth, the use of the Unreal Engine 5 Nanite system, explains the Digital Foundry article, does not necessarily require a super-fast SSD to work, because it uses a virtualization system that fragments the data to be managed by breaking it down into very small fragments and thus using a very light data stream in the streaming of the assets: “This is what distinguishes Unreal Engine 5 from traditional engines … with Nanite the procedure is very gradual”, explained Valient, speaking of the demo Matrix: The Awakening. “When you move around, you move about 10MB of data per second, because a streaming only small parts of textures, small data taken from Nanite, streaming only occurs on small tiles that we really need. In rendering, Nanite chooses the small clusters of triangles that we really need for a particular shot, and we stream only those, so we don’t have to do a huge stream. This allows us to be very fast with regard to I / O and data passing. “
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