Gears of War: E-Day To Feature Ray Traced Lighting, Reflections, and Shadows

[GFreeman]

Few days ago at the Xbox Games Showcase, Microsoft has pulled a rather neat surprise, announcing Gears of War: E-Day, which will be developed by The Coalition in Unreal Engine 5. Microsoft did not go into a lot of details, reveling just a few story details about this prequel to the first Gears of War and releasing the official announce trailer. Thankfully, Microsoft and the developer now shared a bit more story and technical details, also confirming that the game will support ray traced lighting, reflections, and shadows.

In an extensive blog over at the Xbox Wire, Microsoft and The Coalition talk about the story behind the Gears of War: E-Day, which will follow younger versions of the original heroes, Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, going back to where it all started with the fight against the Locust invasion. The Creative Director Matt Searcy and Brand Director Nicole Fawcette were keen to note that the developer is working hard to recreate and improve the third-person action, storytelling, and all other things we expect from Gears of War game.



"It's going to feel like a new Gears game, because that's what it is," Searcy says. "It's us revisiting the tone and the feeling of what makes Gears great, but we're tapping into new techniques, new processes, and new technology that's going to make the gameplay feel better than ever. It's going to be awesome, a game that feels both truly new, and authentically Gears."

In addition, Kate Rayner, Studio Technical Director at The Coalition, revealed a bit more details about the technical side of the game and the advancements that Unreal Engine 5 will bring to the game. According to the Rayner, the game will include over 100 times more environment and character details, compared to the Gears 5. He also confirmed that the game will feature hardware raytraced lighting, reflections, and shadows, as well as "next-generation destruction and gore, and cutting-edge animation technology". As it is based on Unreal Engine 5, the game is expected to use Lumen as well as Nanite, key technologies from UA5 engine. In addition, the developer was keen to note that the game's trailer was an in-engine trailer, and it looks pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, we still do not have a precise date of launch but hopefully, Microsoft and The Coalition will share more details soon.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[konga]

Their promotion of ray tracing is interesting. I talked to a friend who's a AAA engine developer yesterday about it and we think possibly some wires got crossed and the game probably doesn't use ray-traced shadows on consoles. UE5 has Virtual Shadow Maps that are nearly as good as RT shadows but faster on AMD hardware, and we can't imagine a scenario where a developer would choose to use ray-traced shadows on consoles over VSMs. They might be doing it anyway, but it would be very weird.

Hardware ray-traced lighting and reflections likely refers to Hardware Lumen, which no other console game has used yet to my knowledge. Every UE5 release so far has stuck to Software Lumen exclusively on consoles, and most don't even give you the option to do HW Lumen on PC. Epic has been trying to optimize HW Lumen for use on consoles and maybe with Gears E-Day they'll finally get there. (HW Lumen is similar to normal SW Lumen but with more samples per pixel, better reflections, and of course, HW accelerated)

 

[londiste]

Gears 5 has RTGI and I think RT cascaded shadows? Not sure whether hardware acceleration was used though.

Gears of Wars games have always been kind of a showcase of Unreal Engine - not the cutting edge of things but the reasonably new stuff that can viably be used in an AAA title. Outside console marketing push this is mostly related to the new game using state of the art UE5.

 

[konga]

Gears 5 has RTGI and I think RT cascaded shadows? Not sure whether hardware acceleration was used though.

Gears of Wars games have always been kind of a showcase of Unreal Engine - not the cutting edge of things but the reasonably new stuff that can viably be used in an AAA title. Outside console marketing push this is mostly related to the new game using state of the art UE5.

Gears 5 on PC had software-traced SSGI and shadows. They'll need to do another approach for E-Day most likely, and UE5 provides options out of the box for this. The Coalition has a close relationship with Epic and they're likely working hand-in-hand to get Hardware Lumen shippable in the game at 30fps. They'd be the first on consoles to do so.

 

[ymdhis]

Will it feature good gameplay though?
That's kind of a deal breaker.

 

[King Mustard]

"Gears of War: E-Day To Feature Ray Traced Lighting, Reflections, and Shadows"

Ah, so 30 FPS, then. That's a shame.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

The only other UE5 demo they developed the matrix awakens supported RT I'm confused as to why this is a headline and that was back in 2021.

I'm glad they are going back to E day even though I enjoyed Gears 4/5 the story was going a bit off the rails still impressive what they did on basically only slightly better than a radeon HD 7770 equipped Xbox one just significantly more vram.

"Gears of War: E-Day To Feature Ray Traced Lighting, Reflections, and Shadows"

Ah, so 30 FPS, then. That's a shame.

Who cares what it runs like on consoles a 5070 will likely be 2x faster than the series X when this releases.

With whatever the top end chip being 3x to 4x a series X or more.

Their PC ports have been pretty good other than them not liking Pascal cards due to how they handle Async compute.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Will it feature good gameplay though?
That's kind of a deal breaker.

Kind of shallow, aren't you? If you're not going to stand around in a FPS/TPS game and admire yourself in the reflection of a window or puddle on the ground then I think you're missing the whole idea of what makes ray tracing so freaking awesome!

Kidding.

I don't care how many fancy traceable rays they give in a game, if the game sucks then it's just wasted time, resources and energy. Also, I don't spend my time trying to stare at my reflection in a game and I'm not trying to tail a suspect like you see in the movies as the protagonist uses the reflections off a window to see which way the bad guy goes. In these games I'm moving fast, ducking for cover, shooting and not:

Honestly, I feel the whole ray tracing thing is just a waste.

 

[napata]

Kind of shallow, aren't you? If you're not going to stand around in a FPS/TPS game and admire yourself in the reflection of a window or puddle on the ground then I think you're missing the whole idea of what makes ray tracing so freaking awesome!

Kidding.

I don't care how many fancy traceable rays they give in a game, if the game sucks then it's just wasted time, resources and energy. Also, I don't spend my time trying to stare at my reflection in a game and I'm not trying to tail a suspect like you see in the movies as the protagonist uses the reflections off a window to see which way the bad guy goes. In these games I'm moving fast, ducking for cover, shooting and not:

Honestly, I feel the whole ray tracing thing is just a waste.

Graphics and tech sell games, especially for a franchise like Gears. That's always how it's been and it's also why AAA games take 5+ years to make now.

 

[Double-Click]

Stop the presses, a AAA game will have RT in 2025...

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

Will it feature good gameplay though?
That's kind of a deal breaker.

Shhh, we dont care about stupid gameplay, only in ways to spread the wishes of Dear Leader Jensen hype machine.

I'm confused as to why this is a headline

Simple, Ngreedia marketing team has taken over the tech world.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Stop the presses, a AAA game will have RT in 2025...

Yeah if it was Pathtracing on UE5 in a shipping game maybe but almost all big releases have some form of RT.

It could be the first game with hardware lumen on console at least in inengine cutscenes they all ready did that in the Matrix Demo even gears 5 the cinematics ran at 30fps at much higher fidelity on console.

Mayne they'll do a split 60/30 again but given how weak consoles are at this point who knows.

 

[RadeonProVega]

Honestly i rather see them port Gear of wars 2 and 3 for the PC.

 

[Hyderz]

although i wanted gears of war 6, i wanted that chapter to end... but i guess more coletrain is a good thing

 

[Prima.Vera]

UE5 doesn't need stupid ray trace crap. Their VSM (Virtual Shadow Maps) are almost the same quality without the huge performance hit. Hopefully they will have that in the game, so I can disable those.
Just look at Hellblade 2. Their use of VSMs were almost perfect. I saw Ray traced reflections and shadow way worst that what was on that game.

 

[ZoneDymo]

colour me severely unimpressed, and hell that song again? that just solidifies this looking as some E3 trailer for the xbox 360....

 

[pbupm]

RayTracing is great and games using it will increase as time goes on. those Raster Purist aren't happy and they will be less happy in the future as their outdated hardware can't support it.

 

[konga]

UE5 doesn't need stupid ray trace crap. Their VSM (Virtual Shadow Maps) are almost the same quality without the huge performance hit. Hopefully they will have that in the game, so I can disable those.
Just look at Hellblade 2. Their use of VSMs were almost perfect. I saw Ray traced reflections and shadow way worst that what was on that game.

VSMs are just shadows. The lighting and reflections in Hellblade 2 are handled by Lumen, which uses software ray tracing by default. If this game is using hardware-accelerated ray tracing, that probably means they're using Lumen still, the same solution as Hellblade 2, but in its hardware accelerated mode which will produce more accurate and detailed results.

 

[Prima.Vera]

VSMs are just shadows. The lighting and reflections in Hellblade 2 are handled by Lumen, which uses software ray tracing by default. If this game is using hardware-accelerated ray tracing, that probably means they're using Lumen still, the same solution as Hellblade 2, but in its hardware accelerated mode which will produce more accurate and detailed results.

That's correct. But the funny thing is, Lumen is way less taxing on FPS than the RT in hardware for some reason. Maybe their implementation is very optimized for the engine?

 

[konga]

That's correct. But the funny thing is, Lumen is way less taxing on FPS than the RT in hardware for some reason. Maybe their implementation is very optimized for the engine?

The software Lumen path uses very few samples per pixel (less than 1? I don't remember) with a radiance cache to keep light bounce information across multiple frames, and it traces against signed distance fields. It's essentially a much more advanced form of ray marching, which already works alright without HW-accelerated RT. HW Lumen uses more rays per pixel and traces against a bounding volume hierarchy. It's the BVH that really bogs things down I think, especially on AMD hardware since that lacks any kind of BVH acceleration (but apparently that's changing starting with RDNA 3.5). But it provides better GI and far superior reflections.