YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Sweeney

lines on the record: 296
first: 2025-04-30
most recent: 2025-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The bigger amount of code you ask AI for, the more it leaves you with just a massive code that sort of works, right? And that's the problem with code. Like 99% works, but the 1% might be harder to get to 100% with AI than with hand coding. And everybody who's looking at this topic should actually try using the coding assistance on hard problems and see how they do there.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a lot of complicated Trends underway. It can be hard to break them down and distinguish. And I think a lot of people, the theories that get the biggest traction on social media often don't capture the real underlying motive forces at play there. But yeah, I think AI involved in code production will probably create a net benefit for the need for humanity to be involved in coding. It might change parts of jobs. I don't think it's going to obsolete anybody who's willing to learn new ways of doing things. And it's always been this way. And I think that there's also a lot of overhype in AI. AI is really great at spewing out code that does something that a million GitHub repositories already do because it's kind of learned the underlying pattern. It's notoriously hard to get to do something new. It hasn't been done before, especially when it's a complex task.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This part of it with this thing, or make that object green, and it just like it can't do it. Often it can't be convinced with any number of words in the problem. And that makes it feel like the computer has taken control away from us. You know, humans and artists is refusing to do what we want and has its own opinions. It feels like a competitor. I think when we have much, much, much more nuanced control of it, an artist can go in and just like, yeah, let's enhance this object, do this, do that, do that. It'll feel it's like some of the tools that exist in Photoshop, which are in some ways compared to a paintbrush or superpowers already. AI will come to feel like that too. And we'll increasingly serve creators creating and enhancing a work in a way that feels just a natural extension of their own bodies and minds.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, you know, over time, the people were educated and realized, oh, these are just instruments people are playing, and they're controlling them the same way they did before. There are similar questions about is computer art built in Photoshop really art, or is it just goofy computer stuff? And, you know, I think nowadays digital artists have gained respect. If you look at just the tools that have existed in Photoshop, some of them are pretty sophisticated. And nowadays they have AI features, but I think AI is ultimately going to be another tool in the artist tool set. And I think it's going to become a more powerful, directable, and human serving tool in the future. And I think a lot of the alienation comes from the prompt either being immensely powerful, giving you an entire creation, but then being completely unwilling to let you control the nuances of it. That feels alienating. You give it an image, but you're like, you know, replace the image of...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is certainly the most extreme example of it because AI is just so far ahead of prior technologies, but similar fears were had in every other industry. There is a fear that digital music synthesis would obsolete musicians. And there's a very brief period of time in which songs with digital music instruments like the early mini-mogs and Yamaha synthesizers weren't allowed to win certain music industry awards because they weren't considered real music.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely untamed tool. I think when we figure out more and more ways to merge these and connect these two together, you can imagine AI enhancing the process of content creation in a traditional scene representation. You can imagine the scene representation being cured with the AI so the AI not only sees a prompt but also here's a list of all of the objects in the world and the characteristics and so on. It can learn more about how those objects should move and interact. So if you get a constant feedback cycle going back and forth between an engine and AI I think you can get the best of both worlds. Stable scenes but also the higher productivity of being able to get content out and the ability to like select specific parts of it in ArcDirect those and to have those art directions stick and be recognized as part of this permanent scene representation.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same scene 10 times in a row. It's always the same. It's never randomly changing. You're like, oh no, why did it that this character's face changed midstream? But it's also rather limited because you have to build everything manually, and it's costly and it's time consuming and it requires expertise. And then you have this other model of the world, which is what AI sees or thinks. You know, if we could peer into what's really happening and its parameters, there's something like the mushy connections of neurons in a brain. It has a vast amount of knowledge about the world and about graphics and about images and about people and about everything else. It's stored in a human incomprehensible form, but it can be extracted through queries like asking it to produce an image from a prompt or a video from a prompt or whatever. But the huge problem with that is it's very mushy data. We don't know how to give it a command that will give us a precise result. And if it produces one image one time and we change our prompt slightly, it might produce something completely different. We were unable to art direct it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's the central challenge of the next decade of game engines and AI for content creation of all sorts. Because you have two very different models of the world that are emerging. There's the scene graph. The technical term we describe to set out of all of the objects in the world in a 3D world maintained by Unreal Engine or another engine. So in the videos you saw it's the rocks and the trees and the snow and the bridge and the people and all of these things. And each one has enormous amounts of data attached to it. Some are like texture maps. Some are sound files. Some are animation files. And enormous amounts of detail all stored there in that procedure. In this computer, precise computer graphic representation that enables rendering it from any perspective with any settings and so on. It's a completely general system that has complete context about the state of the world at any point. And so you can always precisely reproduce it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody's going to have even more opportunity than they have now. And every single technological revolution has changed the way that people work, but it's ultimately created more opportunity for people. And their opponents predicting that this might be the last. I think just the opposite. I'm an optimist on this and the optimist and an optimist that it's going to create opportunity for everyone”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of thousands of real world objects at extremely high levels of quality a day of everything from rocks to trees to archaeological finds and so on, all captured there. And we have an awesome library of them on the FAB content site. What's missing is the ability to create arbitrary amounts of new content. And I think using data like that and AI to create completely new trees that meet your specification from all of the knowledge it has built up of high quality scan trees, it's going to be a really valuable thing. But, you know, I don't see this reducing the need for people or the role of people. Rather, I think it actually is probably an enhancer on that. I can't help but think when I go on Amazon and Netflix to watch a movie. There's an awful lot of linear content and most of it isn't very good because, you know, of the limitations of the media and of budgets and of other things.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlike the fields of generative 2D art and generative text, I think the future of AI is much more complex and nuanced. I think your interview with Mark Zuckerberg conducted in VR was a really good first example of this. So you did this VR discussion. It was capturing your faces and then rendering a completely 3D computer graphics model of your faces. And then the end result was patched up by an AI image enhancer that was able to add an awful lot of the missing subtleties that are lost by normal computer graphics rendering. And that's a first step. You know, you can imagine the output of Unreal Engine being enhanced by an AI pixel shading post processor is one thing. You can imagine creation of objects being enhanced, especially mashing up high-quality objects that have already been created. Epics, a quick soul team went around the world and scanned”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI just doesn't have anything resembling an understanding of the entire scene therein, the entire arc of the movie or plot therein, and the entirety of the world around them and how it might affect a scene. Whereas game engines have that, exactly where they need to be. So I think what we're going to see in the space of world-class high-quality productions isn't just everybody moves to AI and a large part of the human creatives contributing to that are obsolete. I think what we're going to see is AI becoming a multiplying force on the power of human creatives, making them able to create better stuff more quickly and with higher quality end results.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of people in the industry are overly optimistic about the rate of progress of AI for video and other things like that. The real problem is consistency. Like spurting out an image is really high quality. But with video over the course of seeing all the AI approaches have consistency issues going from one place to another. And I don't think that those will just be remedied easily. Fundamentally,”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just the overall end result is that much higher. It's as much because the actors are able to do their jobs better, seeing the scene they're end because the technology is enabling a better lighting calculation and a better interplay of virtual light and real world light to make the end result awesome.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing capabilities and productivity, the limiting factor in every one of these businesses is cost. And the more the engine can make their jobs easier, the more power that brings them. One of the big revolutions we've seen in Hollywood is moving away from doing computer graphics integration into a human scene with green screens to moving to these large LED wall panels. They're displaying real-time computer graphics powered by the unreal engine. And that's a massive improvement in quality. You can recognize the old green screen movies because the lighting on the characters is just wrong. And as much as they try to fix it up, it never really works. When you're filming in front of an LED panel with LED light emitters in front of you as well, the actor not only picks up all of the lighting from the actual natural scene that they're supposed to appear in in the movie, but they also can look around and see it, and they're aware of exactly what set they're acting in.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. And you have to appreciate the algorithms are doing quite a lot here. You can have a scene with a huge number of not just lights, but also bright objects that reflect light off of them. Every one of those has to be captured in the reflections in order for it to be realistic. And you can't calculate every photon in the scene. And so you need really detailed approximations. And that's the field of computer graphics. It's about increasingly effective approximations of the laws of physics, which are just totally intractable.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the industry's gone through a massive evolution. So many supporting systems to make this awesome, and always are us.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light in the real world goes through a lot of bounces, and the effect of it are very, very subtle, but when they're not there, you miss them. Often a person can't point out why a scene is wrong, but they know it looks wrong, and it's the lack of the subtle lighting cues that we're seeing here.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of physics are known, and so the complete solution to this, it was written down in the 1950s, I think. The real magic here in Lumen is this system that Daniel Wright developed over the course of many years based on ideas formed over a longer period of time to calculate the way lighting bounces around at different scales, ranging from the scale of miles or kilometers down to the scale of pixels and millimeters. not only calculated at each level, but integrate it seamlessly at each level to give the appearance of completely seamless and accurate lighting. And previous techniques were highly specialized, and RS had to make a decision for each light about exactly what it did. Nicole, and a lot of the practice with it now is you build a scene, you place lights in it, and it just works to make it that much easier.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lumen is a system for global illumination, being it's supposed to calculate the interaction of light with the entire scene in a way that mimics reality. The first generation of engines that did lighting just said, well, the light casts light and the surfaces it hits are lit and the surfaces it doesn't directly hit are dark and that's just all the techniques we have. So you'd have an area that wasn't hit by any light being completely black. In reality, light bounces around the entire scene dynamically when a light hits a red wall then most of the blue and green light is absorbed but the red light reflects off and now is hitting other things and so if you have a red wall with a white floor light is bouncing off of the red wall into the floor and now the floor is being turned red and so the entire bouncing of light around the scene through multiple bounces is the critical challenge to solve here and again”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. When you have an artist or actor in your studio and you're recording a specific performance, you can just capture their facial motion and apply it. But if all you have is a voice recording, or you're generating a voice recording, or it's parametric or procedural or AI generated, yeah, then you need the system to translate that speech not only to movement of the mouth and lips, but also to facial expressions and the whole intent. When we're speaking, it's our whole face that's active and emoting in different ways and not just a mechanical motion of the pieces”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, this is 30 years into a project that's probably like 50 years in total to get to absolute photorealism and controllability for absolutely everything. So there's vast amounts of work still to do. And we don't feel like we've solved the problem at all. We've just given artists a big productivity multiplier and a quality multiplier, but this is not in a state that we would say is done.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sophisticate and non obvious. And if you just applied it literally, then it would be completely wrong from your point of view. So those are the main tools that people are using now. And then within the unreal engine, then you have a face and you can do absolutely anything you want to it. And you could also, you know, if you decide to go outside of the meta-human geometry pipeline, you could build your own face, like any creature of any sort, and then use the animation tools to animate it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two main tools compared to the old days where every face was created by hand by an artist from scratch. One is a meta-human creator tool for creating faces where you have a huge number of parameters you can adjust to create a unique human by adjusting all the different capabilities of them. You can then get that automator until Unreal Engine and then you can add all kinds of computer graphics features that are in the engine. You could add clothing using the cloth simulation system and you can adjust the hair and all these other parameters on the thing. And then there's meta-human animator, a tool for animating a human based on a facial capture which can be done on a device as simple as like an iPhone and transfers the captured animation to the human you want which is not straightforward if the actor has one face shape and the character on screen has another face shape. The translation that needs to be done from the actor to the face is actually really”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Getting faces right requires the interplay of literally dozens of different systems and aspects of computer graphics. And if any one of them is wrong, your eye is completely drawn to that and you find it on the wrong side of Uncanty Valley. So the level of perfection needed in this area is vastly, vastly higher than world rendering or grass or any of these other things. If the shadow is on a And work of architecture slightly wrong, you're pretty providing it, actually. Your brain doesn't really care that much. With anything wrong with the human, it's totally jarring.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humans is a pig, but really our skin as light travels through it. It's not completely opaque. And the way in which light travels through skin has a huge impact on our appearance. This is why there's no way you can paint a mannequin to look realistic for a human. It's just a solid surface and one never have the sore detail you see.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ideas is capture giant amounts of this high precision data, and then you use it to reconstruct a face at a consumer level. Like maybe take an iPhone photo of somebody's face and then capture a very accurate depiction of that, not by synthesizing it then and there on that device, but by combining all the known details of human faces to accurately capture the most accurate representation of that. So that's the data problem. There's a lot of other problems of computer graphics. There's technology for rendering hair, which is really hard because you can't render every, again, we know the laws of physics. It would be easy to just render every hair. It would just be a billion times too slow. So you need approximations that capture the net effect of hair on rendering and on pixels without calculating every single interaction of every light with every strand of hair. That's one part of it. There's detailed features for different parts of faces. There's subservice scattering because we think of”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Face, but it's also about the entire range of motion that they might go through. Capturing one human requires a few hours of capture work in a dedicated environment like that, then thousands of hours of processing work to capture a precise and real-time replicable version of that human in the environment. And so one of the things that's done is just capturing an actor or actress in the real world and then using them in a video game. But the much more interesting thing going on is capturing thousands of humans to form a data set whose goal is to encompass the entire range of faces in all of humanity. So going around every culture, every continent, every age, and every face, variety and capturing representative people. So the entire range of faces is represented. And then being able to combine and merge those together to enable recreating an arbitrary face that the system's never seen before. So, you know what?”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It becomes by far the hardest problem. So the metahumans effort is part of a decades-long initiative that Vladimirich, the most talented digital humans, visionary in the world has been working on for generations and generations of games, serving individual clients around the game industry for a while and then joining Epic as part of the three lateral team. And leading now a worldwide effort to build all of the technologies required to make digital humans realistic. Okay, one part is capturing humans. And so they felt really advanced dedicated hardware that puts a human and capture sphere with dozens of cameras in them taking high resolution, high frame rate video of them as they go through a range of motions and then capturing the human face is complicated because the nuance detail of our faces and how all the muscles and sinews and fat work together to give us different expressions. So it's not only about the shape of a person.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Humans are by far the hardest part of computer graphics because millions of years of evolution have given us dedicated brain systems to detect patterns and faces and infer emotions and intent because cavemen had to, when they see a stranger, determine whether they were likely friendly or they might be trying to kill them. And so humans we people in the world have extraordinarily detailed expectations of a face and we can notice imperfections.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer looked like a video game. It looked like just a burning trash can billowing out dark smoke. It's the artist's sophistication. It's a very, very, very large part of it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a really powerful particle system underneath that's providing the technological foundations for this sort of thing, but there's awesome artistry on top of that. And an awesome physics engine powering it. It's hard to tell exactly which piece is doing what, but you have several different particle systems there. There's one for the fire, and then there's another one for the smoke coming out of it. The really interesting thing happening with smoke here is that it's occluding light. There's calculation of how the light should diminish as it travels through smoke, and so you're seeing the lighting on the smoke being really interesting thing. There have been a lot of attempts, but this was the first demo where I felt like this kind of smoke had really”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Layer materials on top of each other and see how much of each material should be protruding in different places with the engine handling transitions and things like that.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A core system for material layering and a dozen pieces coming together here. You also notice there's a fogginess and there's some hot objects emanating fog. An artist did that. That didn't just arise automatically.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the power of awesome technical art three decades of feature development. And you have to give credit also to the 20 teraflops of graphics performance that NVIDIA is delivering.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quality level, even easier and more seamless and automatic. You'd like to just build a scene and say, use this material here and have this appearance come out of it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that's right. The engine supports a number of different reflection techniques. One is calculating basically textures that reflect, that capture all the lighting in the scene and then bouncing that off of texture maps so you can see different lights bouncing off of different pixels in different ways. And then there's individual lighting casting reflections off of things too. And a lot of this is under the control of designers. And one of the things that's yet to do problem for the future is You don't just press a few buttons in this kind of scene magically appears. This is a lot of work from some highly skilled people not only building out this particular scene but in setting up the material layers so that you get the dirt with the ice layered on top and all the reflections working. And they need to make a number of technical art decisions to make this work. And if a novice who hadn't worked very hard about the kind of scene like this, it wouldn't look nearly as good. So one of the challenges we have is to make building this kind of”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not even sure what's causing it, it looks like color is bleeding from some parts of the snow onto other parts of the snow. It looks like there's some subsurface scattering going on. And I'm not even sure if that's being used. The scene. And then there's a material layering system for laying down layers of material dirt and snow and other things all making that work. And then there's the light bouncing off of the geometry, which is another system for lighting on top of the global illumination system.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shadowing is the amazing thing, but the reason that works is counterintuitive. When somebody first explained it to me, I was like, That's really clever, but I don't think that will work. It does work because if you observe the positions of incoming light and you know the z coordinates of the different pixels on the screen, you can figure out how geometry there is likely to occlude other geometry. And even though it's only an approximation and isn't perfect, it looks perfectly good to the human eye and gives you the subtle shadowing that you see like this. It makes it look highly realistic. And the shadowing influences other things. There's also some really interesting”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That screen space sighting. There's actually shadow calculation going on not based on the world, but on the pixels on the screen, because that is the only way that we could possibly do those calculations fast enough, running them in a pixel shader.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lighting happening the Lumen lighting system that's powering the scene is doing different kinds of lighting calculations at different scales. This was the work of Daniel Wright following a decade of moving the state-of-the-art lighting forward. But his theory, which was rather controversial at the time, was that if you have enough levels of lighting calculation, then you can get everything global illumination working everywhere from the absolute highest levels of a scene that buildings are casting cracked shadows all the way down to details like you see on the dirt here, all working in concert and without distinguishable boundaries. So there is a good decade of foundational work there to make the lighting work. In particular, when you see the very detailed shadows interplaying between the ice and the dirt there,”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot happening here on screen. And the real hero of this image isn't epic. It's the artists and technical artists who work together to build this environment because it... And the reason we showed it at GDC was it went way, way beyond what we realized the system was capable of doing, largely because of their brilliance. And this is the magic of computer graphics. There's not one feature that makes this cool. There's a dozen technical features that each interplay. And because of the ways that they interplay with each other, you really don't, it's hard to actually identify the individual components of it. One thing that's happening here that's really critical, oh yeah, now we're seeing it being turned off.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the complications of multi threading. And over time, that becomes increasing limitation. So we're really thinking about and working on the next generation of technology and that being on your engine 6. And that's the generation we're actually going to go and address a number of the really core limitations that have been with us over the history of Unreal Engine and get those on a better foundation that the modern world deserves given everything that's been learned in the field of computing in that time frame.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A file management system has been optimized a number of times, but it hasn't been completely rethought. And the networking system, the ways that clients and servers talk together and negotiate game state is still an evolution of the thing I wrote. And it's feeling kind of dated now. You still see networking bugs in Fortnite where for some reason when you're spectating, you're not seeing some parameters update. Well, that's because of the lossful nature of that networking model. And the biggest limitation that's built up over time is the single threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we're using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single thread programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-thread programming. And we didn't want to burden either ourselves or our partners or the community.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total observable photorealism for artists who wanted to create that. And so that's been the evolution. And the progress on the graphic side is absolutely astonishing. As it is on the audio side in a number of other areas, but parts of the engine also haven't changed all that much since the version I wrote and shipped in 1998.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that DirectX 9 generation was a godssend, and Andrew Scheidercker, a longtime epic luminary, wrote the core of the unreal engine 3 render around real time pixel shading, real-time lighting, being able to do dynamic shadows using several different techniques, and multi-thread the render to support bits of the early dual core CPUs that were starting to show up at the time. And it was a massive, massive graphical upgrade. Under Engine 4 made a number of improvements and just continued to add features to make more and more give artists more and more options for lighting and for geometry that created realism. But then I think probably our biggest single level of elite. Which I think really bridged the gap from game-ish computer graphics to”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fully capable and utilized. On your Engine 2 was about bringing all the latest GPU hardware acceleration features to the engine and keeping forward and voting some new features like vehicles and a few other capabilities And this was in the early GPU era before GPUs had really broken out of everybody's expectations of Warsaw. Would that breakout occurred with DirectX 9 and the capabilities of programmable shaders? Once you had control of writing code running on the GPU that could color every pixel on the screen, and that GPU code was literally a factor of 100 times faster than the equivalent code I wrote a few years earlier on the Pentium 90.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly In graphics, it's been even more so. It's something literally 10 million times more net usable GPU performance than we had back running on a Pentium 90 CPU all in 30 years. And it's really made me appreciate that over the generations, some areas of our engine development have absolutely kept up with technology. And the rendering team that works on Unreal Engine are the real miracle workers there. About every generation of Unreal, we've replaced most of the rendering code. And the different leaders in different points in times and the different luminaries have built systems that were absolutely rethought and optimized for the latest generation of hardware. Unreal Engine 1 was built for software rendering and then the Voodoo One came along late in the cycle and we added support for it, but it wasn't fully.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been an astonishing experience. Nobody 30 years ago had anticipated that we'd see the performance gains in hardware that we've actually seen the time frame. It's something like 100,000 times higher CPU performance between multiple cores and higher clock rates and more parallelism. If we had an aviation, then we'd be taking a trip to... Neighboring stars.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singularly has this intense dedication The best result from his code, and having absolutely no attachment to pass code, and some of the legendary things he did, the end result was an absolute breakthrough in real-time computer graphics, weren't his first try. They were like his seventh or eighth try after he'd done something time and time again, tried it, found a better approach, thrown out the old one, built it again, and continually rewrote its code until he found the absolute best solution to a problem. I think that stands as a lesson for every programmer to pick up on when something is really, really important, its performance is absolutely critical to the product or its quality or its capabilities just. Iterate on it until you've achieved perfection and don't settle for the first or second solution is good enough.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source