AMD has recently released two new plugins for Unreal Engine 4 and 5 that help developers easily add support for FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 to their games. The first FSR 2.0 games only started to arrive this month but with over 20 titles already announced to be receiving the technology we expect that this latest development will greatly increase that number. AMD joins NVIDIA in offering Unreal Engine plugins to simplify the implementation of their respective temporal upscaling solutions with AMD claiming that adding FSR 2.0 support only takes days for games that already use motion vectors. AMD has published developer guides on how to install and use the plugins on which can be found below.

Millions of viewers around the world today watched the world premiere cinematic trailer for Frost Giant Studios' eagerly-anticipated real-time strategy game, Stormgate. Southern California-based Frost Giant Studios was founded in 2020 by Tim Morten and Tim Campbell, veteran game development leaders who helped create some of the most acclaimed and best-selling PC games of all time-as well as some of the most-watched esports-including Blizzard Entertainment's WarCraft III and StarCraft II.

"We are building Stormgate for the real-time strategy community--past, present, and future," said Tim Morten, CEO and production director at Frost Giant Studios. "Our vision is to create a social experience that breaks down the barriers that have kept people away, to welcome back players who have been waiting for the next great RTS, and to prove that the RTS genre can thrive once again."

Epic Games is excited to announce that The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is now available to download for free on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. This boundary-pushing technical demo is an original concept set within the world of Warner Bros' The Matrix. Written and cinematically directed by Lana Wachowski, it features Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity and—in a reality-flipping twist—also playing themselves.

The project reunited many of the crew that worked on the seminal The Matrix trilogy, including James McTeigue, Kym Barrett, John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, Jerome Platteaux, George Borshukov, and Michael F Gay, in collaboration with teams across both Epic Games and partners, such as SideFX, Evil Eye Pictures, The Coalition, WetaFX (formerly Weta Digital), and many others.

The wait is over—we're very excited to announce that Unreal Engine 5 is now available to download! With this release, we aim to empower both large and small teams to really push the boundaries of what's possible, visually and interactively. UE5 will enable you to realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before. As you may have seen, the new features and workflows have already been production-proven for game development in Fortnite and The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience demo.

Meanwhile, although some major new features like Lumen and Nanite have not yet been validated for non-games workflows (this is an ongoing goal for future releases), all creators will be able to continue using workflows supported in UE 4.27. But they'll also benefit from a redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, artist-friendly animation tools, an extended mesh creation and editing toolset, improved path tracing, and much more. See the documentation for full details.

Enriching its game developer ecosystem, NVIDIA today announced the launch of new NVIDIA Omniverse features that make it easier for developers to share assets, sort asset libraries, collaborate and deploy AI to animate characters' facial expressions in a new game development pipeline. With the NVIDIA Omniverse real-time design collaboration and simulation platform, game developers can use AI- and NVIDIA RTX -enabled tools, or easily build custom ones, to streamline, accelerate and enhance their development workflows. New features for game developers include updates to Omniverse Audio2Face, Omniverse Nucleus Cloud and Omniverse DeepSearch, as well as the introduction of Unreal Engine 5 Omniverse Connector.

"Omniverse provides a powerful development pipeline that addresses the challenges of doing business in today's world," said Frank DeLise, vice president of Omniverse at NVIDIA. "Its ability to unify artists, art, tools and applications under a single platform can inspire collaboration among even the most dispersed game development organization."

CD PROJEKT RED today revealed that the next installment in The Witcher series of video games is currently in development with Unreal Engine 5, kicking off a new saga for the franchise and a new technology partnership with Epic Games.

Today's announcement marks the first official confirmation of a new game in The Witcher series since the release of CD PROJEKT RED's previous single-player, AAA RPG in the franchise—The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—which won a total of 250 Game of the Year awards and was later expanded upon with the Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine add-ons.

AMD released the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) plugin for Unreal Engine 4, allowing game developers to integrate the performance enhancement technology with their games. A competing technology to NVIDIA DLSS, FSR lets gamers improve frame-rates of their games by trading off quality. At the higher "Quality" presets, this quality loss is supposed to be practically unnoticeable, but with significant improvements to frame-rates. We detailed how the technology works in our article that gets under its hood and evaluates performance. At its launch, AMD listed out a broad list of launch partners for the technology, but Unreal was a notable absentee. Over the following months, AMD appears to have worked toward bringing the tech to even UE4. The plugin is being distributed through AMD's GPUOpen portal.

DOWNLOAD: AMD FSR Plugin for Unreal Engine 4

Qualcomm. introduces Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, a headworn Augmented Reality (AR) developer kit to enable the creation of immersive experiences that seamlessly blur the lines between our physical and digital realities. With proven technology and an open, cross-device horizontal platform and ecosystem, Snapdragon Spaces delivers the tools to bring developers' ideas to life and revolutionize the possibilities of headworn AR. Snapdragon Spaces is in early access with select developers and is expected to be generally available in the Spring of 2022.

Qualcomm Technologies is a pioneer in Augmented Reality with over a decade of AR research and development. Utilizing these years of innovation and expertise, Snapdragon Spaces offers robust machine perception technology that is optimized for performance and low power for the next generation of AR glasses. The Snapdragon Spaces platform provides environmental and user understanding capabilities that give developers the tools to create headworn AR experiences that can sense and intelligently interact with the user and adapt to their physical indoor spaces. Some of the marquee environmental understanding features include spatial mapping and meshing, occlusion, plane detection, object and image recognition and tracking, local anchors and persistence, and scene understanding. The user understanding machine perception features include positional tracking and hand tracking.

AMD today in a blog post announced several updates to the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology, its performance enhancement rivaling NVIDIA DLSS, which lets gamers dial up performance with minimal loss to image quality. To begin with, the company released the source code of the technology to the public under its GPUOpen initiative, under the MIT license. This makes it tremendously easy (and affordable) for game developers to implement the tech. Inspecting the source, we find that FSR relies heavily on a multi-pass Lanczos algorithm for image upscaling. Next up, we learn that close to two dozen games are already in the process of receiving FSR support. Lastly, it's announced that Unity and Unreal Engine support FSR.

AMD broadly detailed how FSR works in its June 2021 announcement of the technology. FSR sits within the render pipeline of a game, where an almost ready lower-resolution frame that's been rendered, tone-mapped, and anti-aliased, is processed by FSR in a two-pass process implemented as a shader, before the high-resolution output is passed on to post-processing effects that introduce noise (such as film-grain). HUD and other in-game text (such as subtitles), are natively rendered at the target (higher) resolution and applied post render. The FSR component makes two passes—upscaling, and sharpening. We learn from the source code that the upscaler is based on the Lanczos algorithm, which was invented in 1979. Media PC enthusiasts will know Lanczos from MadVR, which has offered various movie upscaling algorithms in the past. AMD's implementation of Lanczos-2 is different than the original—it skips the expensive sin(), rcp() and sqrt() instructions and implements them in a faster way. AMD also added additional logic to avoid the ringing effects that are often observed on images processed with Lanczos.

NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology has been developed to upscale lower resolutions using artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms. By using this technique, users with RTX cards can increase their framerates in supported games, with minimal loss in image quality. Recently, AMD introduced FidelityFX Super Resolution, a competing technology, which in one aspect might be technologically better than the DLSS competition. How you might wonder? Well, at the "quality" setting, NVIDIA's DLSS renders the game at 66.6% of the resolution, upscaling it 1.5 times. At the same "quality" preset, AMD FSR renders the game at 77% of the resolution and upscales the image by 1.3 times. This is technically providing an advantage to AMD FSR technology, as the image is posed to look better with less upscaling. DLSS on the other hand uses much more information, because it considers multiple frames in its temporal algorithm.

That newfound competition could be what made NVIDIA re-think their options and today we are getting some exciting news regarding DLSS. In the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) documentation, there is a placeholder for "Ultra Quality" DLSS mode, which is supposed to rival AMD's "Ultra Quality" mode and offer the best possible image quality. Currently, the latest DLSS version is 2.2.6.0, which is present in some DLSS supported games, and can be added to others using a DLL-swap. The updated version with the Ultra Quality preset is already present in UE5, called DLSS 2.2.9.0. Mr. Alexander Battaglia from Digital Foundry has made a quick comparison using the two versions, however, we are waiting for more in-depth testing to see the final results.

NVIDIA is reportedly about to make some big announcements related to its DLSS 2.0 performance enhancement feature. Excepts from the announcement we leaked to the web by VideoCardz. To begin with, the company is about to announce that both the upcoming Unreal Engine 5, and the current UE 4, support DLSS 2.0, besides the latest version 2021.2 of the Unity Engine. A large number of first-party game engines now support DLSS 2.0, including notably, the Rockstar Games RAGE engine powering RDR2, CryEngine, Decima, AnvilNext, REDEngine, and more.

NVIDIA is also preparing to announce that a vast new selection of games support DLSS 2.0, including Red Dead Redemption 2 (support coming soon), Rainbow Six Siege, DOOM Eternal (patch scheduled for June 29), Rust, and more. Lastly, NVIDIA is about to announce that it is working with Valve to bring DLSS support to Linux, via Proton compatibility layer. This will enable playing AAA Windows games on Linux with DLSS enabled.

Today Epic Games announced that it completed a $1 billion round of funding, which will allow the company to support future growth opportunities. Epic's equity valuation is now $28.7 billion.

This round includes an additional $200M strategic investment from Sony Group Corporation, which builds on the already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces their shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services. Other investment partners include Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital. Epic continues to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and CEO Tim Sweeney remains the controlling shareholder of the company.

When NVIDIA launched the second iteration of its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technique used to upscale lower resolutions using deep learning, everyone was impressed by the quality of the rendering it is putting out. However, have you ever wondered how it all looks from the developer side of things? Usually, games need millions of lines of code and even some small features are not so easy to implement. Today, thanks to Tom Looman, a game developer working with Unreal Engine, we have found out just how the integration process of DLSS 2.0 looks like, and how big are the performance benefits coming from it.

Inthe blog post, you can take a look at the example game shown by the developer. The integration with Unreal Engine 4.26 is easy, as it just requires that you compile your project with a special UE4 RTX branch, and you need to apply your AppID which you can apply for at NVIDIA's website. Right now you are probably wondering how is performance looking like. Well, the baseline for the result was TXAA sampling techniques used in the game demo. The DLSS 2.0 has managed to bring anywhere from 60-180% increase in frame rate, depending on the scene. These are rather impressive numbers and it goes to show just how well NVIDIA has managed to build its DLSS 2.0 technology. For a full overview, please refer to the blog post.

Sony Electronics Inc. today announced the debut of the Spatial Reality Display (SR Display), a groundbreaking new product made with Sony's award-winning Eye-Sensing Light Field Display (ELFD) technology. The display, initially shared with attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of this year, does not require virtual reality glasses or a headset. The SR Display enables creators across a variety of industries, from automotive and industrial design, to Computer Graphics (CG) and Visual Effects (VFX) designers and creators in film to bring ideas to life in stunning 3D displays.

"We're excited to bring the world's best technology to bear, moving the design and creation industry forward, particularly as the shift to digital has become so pronounced," stated Mike Fasulo, president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics North America. "This technology drives new versatility, allowing us to advance an entirely new medium and experience for designers and creators everywhere."

Epic Games and Apple are engaged in an ugly legal battle over Epic's decision to add an in-app payment system for "Fortnite," in violation of Apple's terms. All in-game micro-transactions are expected to be routed through the App Store. Apple essentially de-platformed Epic Games, and "Fortnite," which would have far-reaching implications including restrictions on third-party games using the Unreal Engine. On Monday, Epic Games got a partial and temporary relief against Apple's action, in the form of a temporary restraining order which prevents Apple from terminating the developer accounts of Epic Games, and restricting the use of Unreal Engine by game developers on Apple platforms.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hearing the matter, however ruled that Apple isn't required to restore "Fortnite," which it banned after Epic Games added its in-game payments system that stepped on Apple's toes. Epic Games in its prayer to the Court argued that Apple's actions brought "irreparable harm" to the company. The Court disagreed. "The Court finds that with respect to Epic Games' motion as to its games, including Fortnite, Epic Games has not yet demonstrated irreparable harm. The current predicament appears of its own making." She argued that Epic Games "strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple."

In the ongoing turf war between Epic Games and Apple, the game and engine development company has now signed a powerful ally to its side: Microsoft. In an announcement via Twitter, XBOX vice president Phil Spencer announced that Microsoft had filed a statement in support of Epic's lawsuit against Apple - specifically, regarding the maintenance of Unreal Engine resources, tools, and developer credentials in the Apple store. This comes weeks after the battle royale between Apple and Epic begun, and after Epic started a social media and industry-wide call for support among consumers and corporations alike.

While the merits on Epic's initial move and subsequent lawsuit against Apple may be up for debate, and it's likely that any court of law will say that Epic clearly intended to breach contract terms they had already accepted when distributing Fortnite through the Apple Store, this second one has a much higher amount of O2 to breathe. Apple terminating the Unreal Engine affiliation with its store and development capabilities can potentially send a ripple effect throughout the entire games industry, whether in already-shipped games, currently in development ones, or future development intentions. That Microsoft themselves backed Epic on this particular issue goes to show just how wide a net this conflict is escalating towards.

The epic (ahem) battle between Epic Games and Apple is becoming increasingly nastier, as Apple has communicated to the game and game engine developers that it plans on terminating all of Epic developer accounts on its ecosystem (both on iOS or MacOS) by August 28th. If done, this would impede not only Epic from developing for these systems, but also would impact any and all companies that actually employ the Unreal Engine in their development process, be it final or merely as a toolbox. It's case to say that Apple has its finger firmly set on the big, red button.

This move from Apple comes in wake of the calculated feud initiated by Epic Games last week with both Google and Apple. What some may have failed to see is that the Epic Games move was a coordinated, well-thought-out one, in that the company knew - or thought they knew - the full ramifications of what they were setting in motion. Epic Games, with its newfound budget and clout, is looking to become a banner for developers, spearheading a charge that is looking to brunt the walled garden approach. In fact, the company is even looking to form a "coalition of Apple critics", and is looking for companies to join its bandwagon in fighting against the Apple walled-garden and middle-man approach to software distribution.

Epic Games today announced a $1.78 billion round of funding consisting of primary capital and secondary purchases from employee equity holders. Epic's post-money equity valuation is now $17.3 billion.

This round includes a previously announced $250 million strategic investment from Sony Corporation. Additional investment partners include Baillie Gifford, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and David Tepper. Existing investors KKR and Smash Ventures also added to their 2018 investment. Following the closing of the funding round Epic will continue to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and will remain controlled by its founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney.

Epic Games has just recently unveiled its Unreal Engine version 5, which was demonstrated on next-generation PlayStation 5 console. Showing off some impressive details, Epic Games has managed to use all of the power available to them from the new hardware in the PS5 console. Rocking a custom APU from AMD, the PS5 console has 10.28 TeraFLOPs of computing power, which is paired with a fast NVMe SSD. Such a combination allows for the impressive demo we have seen just a few days ago.

However, if you wonder what equivalent PC hardware would you need to run the demo on, World Today News has concluded that you would need at least to have NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card to run a demo if you could. The RTX 2070S GPU has 9 TeraFLOPs of computing power, and the demonstration would "run pretty good" on that GPU. By the time first Unreal Engine 5 based games come out, next-generation graphics cards should already be available and you wouldn't need to worry if you are getting an upgrade. For the people owning RTX 2070S and faster, they should be good to go for when games based on Unreal Engine 5 hit the market.

Epic Games has just released a trailer for version 5 of their industry/acclaimed Unreal Engine. Dubbed "Lumen in the Land of Nanite", the demo they've shared is nothing short of mindblowing when it comes to the amount of environment and character detail. Unreal Engine 5 will feature a new geometry processing engine Epic is calling Nanite, which the company promises will virtually eliminate polygon budgets for developers, with automatic stream and scaling, thus eliminating the need to develop LOD levels for particular assets. Another addition, and an as impressive one, is the Lumen global illumination engine, which will save developers the need to manually bake lightmaps accounting for every little change in a scene's lighting - the global illumination system makes these changes in lighting conditions as seamless and integrated as they can be. This among other features already introduced with version 4.25 such as Niagara VFX and Chaos destruction systems.

Unreal Engine 5 is pegged for an early 2021 release; Epic Games has already announced they will be porting their popular Fortnite videogame into the engine, which makes sense, considering it's being particularly optimized for PC and next-generation consoles. These will become the backbone of games development - and an important source of Epic's Fortnite revenue stream. Take a look at the trailer after the break - and remember this was all running real-time in a PlayStation 5 console.

The folks over at Dekogon Studios, a game art outsourcing studio, have published on their ArtStation account some Unreal Engine 4 renders to showcase their creative vision and technological mastering of Epic's acclaimed engine. Being one of the more commonly used game development engines due to its rendering quality, ease of use and pipeline flexibility, Unreal Engine is one of the benchmarks for visual quality in the gaming world. These renders from Dekogon Studios using the latest version of Unreal Engine and employing raytracing are absolutely beautiful and incredibly, richly detailed.

While we don't know how many frames per second a modern graphics card could generate at this level of detail (or if it would take seconds to generate a single frame), one can always dream of gaming in environments with the same quality as the showcased basketball court or science classroom (FEAR 2, anyone?). Other environments are slightly less impressive and seem to have taken slightly less attention, but I myself can pretty much see this level of detail on my next Life is Strange or Detroit: Become Human. So, games development studios... Make it happen, please! Look after the break for some videos showcasing these beautiful environments.

GSC Game World announced the second chapter and latest entry to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. The survival horror FPS made its debut in 2007 at a time when PC graphics were taking a technological leap. The Kiev-based game studio since dished out the "Clear Sky" prequel and "Call of Pripyat" sequel last decade, but has since been a recluse to the AAA gaming scene. The development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 appears to be already underway. The game will leverage Unreal Engine, and there's a fairly high possibility of it being Epic Games Store exclusive given its sweet revenue-sharing model that directs 88% of the sales to the game publisher.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 developers (or at least a Twitter handle claiming to represent them), posted two key tweets. One shows a teaser screenshot of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in development; and another with a message from the developers to fans of the game franchise. "The second chapter of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. saga will be our most ambitious game so far. It will live to the legendary legacy," the statement reads. The developers didn't, however, state any timelines. "Consider it (the teaser screenshot and announcement) our humble present, with more to come in 2020," the statement concludes.

FEMFX is a multithreaded CPU library for deformable material physics, using the Finite Element Method (FEM). Solid objects are represented as a mesh of tetrahedral elements, and each element has material parameters that control stiffness, how volume changes with deformation, and stress limits where fracture or plastic (permanent) deformation occur. The model supports a wide range of materials and interactions between materials. We intend for these features to complement rather than replace traditional rigid body physics. The system is designed with the following considerations:

Epic Games, as part of the company's $100 million Epic MegaGrants program, is awarding the Blender Foundation $1.2 million in cash to further the success of Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite that supports the full range of tools empowering artists to create 3D graphics, animation, special effects or games.

The Epic MegaGrants initiative is designed to assist game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing outstanding work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.

If you've heard of Teslasuit, you've likely felt some sort of interest towards it. As well you should: the ideal of a full body suit with haptic feedback for VR experiences is enough for some of us - at least those with the hero, "I'll never get hit by any bullet" complex. Add to the full body haptic feedback capabilities such as full body motion tracking embedded into the suit, as well as localized temperature controls for transmitting heat and cold sensations, and... There's also biometric feedback built in for usage patterns and engagement ratio, to aid developers in their data collecting. Well, can I hear Ready Player One, anyone?

The company behind the Tesla suit have just announced that their product won the Red Dot: Best of the Best, the top distinction in the competition. It is granted for groundbreaking design and goes to the best products in a category. The Teslasuit is now available for distribution as a development kit, and features dedicated software, documentation, API integration with Unreal Engine, Unity, and Motion Builder.