Future is Bright on Android is fully rolled-out [Client Beta]

Hi! Would you kindly be able to send us a placefile reproducing this issue or repro steps so we can look into it, please? Would you have details about the device on which you’re seeing these artifacts too, by any chance, please?

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It’s rolled out on all Android devices! You should be able to see it in experiences with Future lighting enabled if you are running at Graphics Quality level 4/10 and up (which can be viewed in an experience under Settings > Graphics Quality).

Can you let us know which quality level you are running at and in which experience you are expecting to see Future but aren’t please?

We automatically reduce Graphics Quality so that your experience runs performantly; we disable Future automatically if your device can’t run it at least at 30 FPS. You can also manually reduce your Graphics Quality under Settings > Graphics Quality, if you’d like. Some experiences also choose to not run Future; it depends on what the experience’s Creator chose as their Lighting technology.

Hi!

Since Future lighting is a per-pixel lighting technique, a change in DPI scale will affect its performance. This is true for a lot of rendering techniques in general.

Keep in mind that some phone manufacturers will automatically optimize DPI scale and resolution for you to give you a better experience!

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Repro file:
lightsrepro.rbxl (52.4 KB)
edit: updated to include point light and spot light

image

image

CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i5-9400F CPU @ 2.90GHz
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

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I’ve tried a lot of experiences at max graphics, but no future lighting


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I think you did it wrong. If both the light source an object are on the ground, the shadows will be 100% smooth.

image

But on yours, the light source was on the air, resulting in ugly pixelated shadows.

image

Images are blurred due to bright colors.

Okay but To Be Honest, they really need to make the shadows smoother on high-End devices. (consoles for example)

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Could you tell us what device it is? It is possible that the device can’t support what we need from the Vulkan API and falls back to OpenGL, which doesn’t let us run Future Lighting.

You can check it by generating a micro profiler dump to see what type of Graphics API your device uses. If possible, feel free to send one over.

Oh nah, Unreal Engine 5 sucks. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the fancy real life 2 visuals of the engine and the games made with it. Unreal Engine 5 is pretty much roblox but if it was designed for the general gaming industry. UE5 often spews out fancy promises such as how they let you accelerate game development (just like roblox), how “performant” all of their brand new magic toys are (like roblox, talking about things like Nanite also), how accessible the engine is (like roblox, engine wont run on anything at half decent framerates without tons of upscaling and frame gen) and many other similar promises.
I mean hey, i gotta give props to roblox for the fact that they compile all their shaders when the client first initially loads in like less than 50 milliseconds if i remember correctly. While Unreal Engine 5… there’s a reason as to why many gamers prefer to call it “Stutter Engine 5”. At least it got super inefficient fancy graphics, not like anyone can admire them though… Gotta turn the settings down so it runs at half decent framerates!

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here comes the 4 fps mobile gaming :fire:

My device is a Moto G5 5G.

I don’t really know how to use micro profiler, so I don’t know if it’s this:
_summary (1).json (17.2 KB)

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This is correct! Thanks! You’re unexpectedly on QL 21 Vulkan but running on Voxel somehow. What place did you collect this from?

[Edit: I think I should be able to see the place id in the file actually]

Please note that not all experiences on Roblox are using the Future Lighting Technology and must be set manually by the developer.

I got it from Doors, but the others games are probably using Voxel too

I tried using another device and the future tech was working. So I think it has to do with my phone

i heard that the lights automatically bake

This is an incredibly unthoughtful and random post — Unlike UE5’s Nanite & new GI tech, Roblox’s technology is developed from the ground-up to work for extremely low-end devices. It is already amazing that FiB3 now runs on Android devices, given that they represent the lowest-end market of tablets.

There is of course a valid intellectual debate to be had on whether Roblox should allow for better customization of internal settings, however that is completely different from saying “Roblox is completely behind other engines and the engineers are hopeless” — Roblox has completely different issues and goals from the other engines; this is not an apples to apples comparison!

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Tbh, there could be a lot more optimizations right there, but on the other look, it looks epic.




I cant really tell what makes so different with roughtness effect between parts and terrain, i got by setting the resolution by low (324x720). When it’s higher, other post effects doesn’t show up. And one unsupported post effect with whatever resolution you have, is DepthOfField.
Overfall, that’s nice to have “RTX” graphics on low-end device, almost no lag at all when you have a lower resolution. Thanks for this rollout!

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I believe the only lights that actually bake are just the standard voxel based ones. Future lighting may have been as janky as shadow map/voxel lighting if it also baked it’s own lights.

Not gonna lie, i wonder why do people keep referring to future lighting as “RTX”. Like this is tech originally created nearly 25 years ago and was designed on and for hardware from that time too. I find it crazy that this technology is found “revolutionary” or “next gen” only on Roblox while being the absolute bare minimum in any graphics tech from any other engine. Only difference is that it’s performance on roblox is pretty poor while still not really changing much from its original reveal from back them.

This tech was designed for hardware with less than 100 mb of memory and an lesser amount of pixel shader cores than CPU core counts of the modern day. CUDA did not even exist when this technology started being introduced.
I don’t doubt that those GPU’s from back then did not benefit from the fact that the standard resolutions were like 480p to maybe 600p (so this tech had less pixels to work with) but i sure as hell do not believe that such technology would struggle on modern hardware at standard resolutions. Mid range phones included. Phones already run at like half resolution by default yet this ancient tech is still pretty demanding regardless. It’s still demanding for all platforms.

I believe people calling this “RTX” may give roblox an excuse to simply not deliver anything more out of it (performance, visual enhancements, whatever else) with the excuse that “well, RTX is hard to run because its RTX and its realisitc!”. This isn’t meant to be a call-out post but rather something informative to help people not get simply magically convinced that what roblox is providing here is actually magical “next gen tech” or “RTX”.
Don’t get me wrong, i do think its a good thing for roblox to be implementing those technologies. There’s still TONS of other older tech roblox could be benefiting from. My issue is the fact that this old tech is being thrown around as some sort of revolutionary next gen RTX-ON crap with subpar implementations and subpar performance.

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