Epic Games has presented its new version of the Unreal Engine as part of the Summer Game Fest and has done it in a very special way: with a technical demo running in real-time on a PlayStation 5. This is the first time that Sony's new generation PS5 console has been seen in motion.
The video, which you can see below, has a duration of approximately 9 minutes in which two people responsible for Epic Games reveal the new Unreal Engine 5 with a technical demo while explaining its details. This technical demo works in real-time and even modifications are added to it as the video progresses. For example, the demo changes the position of the light to demonstrate how the terrain responds to lighting.
The technical demo is titled 'Lumen in the Land of Nanite', after two of the new technologies that Unreal Engine 5 includes as the main innovations: Nanite is a virtual tool that allows developers to create "as much geometric detail as the eye can see" thanks to micro-polygons, while Lumen is a global lighting system that responds immediately to changes in scenery and lighting changes.
Nanite will take advantage of the power of next-gen consoles to give developers more creative freedom. According to Epic Games itself, video game creators can import "millions or billions of polygons directly into Unreal Engine 5 (...) and it just works," causing them to forget polygon counters and the amount of memory they consume, without losing an iota of quality.
For its part, Lumen renders infinite reflections on kilometer and millimeter scales so that lighting always responds dynamically to environmental events such as "changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling" and there will always be "indirect lighting will adapt accordingly." Lumen eliminates many intermediate steps that were necessary to determine the well-known volumetric lights of the current generation.
Fortnite confirmed to be available for launch in next-gen
Along with this Unreal Engine 5 demo, the company has also announced its plans to bring Fortnite, its flagship, to the new generation. Epic Games has confirmed that the Battle Royale will be available on PS5 and Xbox One at the launch of the consoles. with a version similar to the one that you can already play. But later, in mid-2021, they will update the game to Unreal Engine 5 to benefit from the changes in the graphics engine.
Epic Games explains on its official website that Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021 with support for PS5, Xbox Series X, PC, Mac, iOS and Android projects. This new version of the engine will have backward compatibility, that is, developers who are working with Unreal Engine 4 will be able to transfer their projects to the next version of the software once it is ready.
In a subsequent interview, also during the Summer Game Fest, Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, spoke about PS5 and its technical performance, praising how its architecture makes the final product so balanced and so avant-garde, which will end up forcing the computer components market to look at it to advance to the PS5 technical level.
The PS5 architecture will make PCs pay attention to it
Sweeney has specifically said that PS5 is a "remarkably balanced device" as it possesses an "immense amount of GPU power". At the same time that it can boast high bandwidth in storage management, which for the CEO of Epic Games will be "absolutely critical", he said.
Sweeney added that it's "one thing to render everything that can fit in memory” but a different proposition entirely to render a world that may be “tens of gigabytes in size” instantaneously".
That said, Tim Sweeney wanted to go further in evaluating the architecture of Sony's next-gen console with a prediction about what this hardware can bring to the technology market:
"The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. [The PC market] is going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this".
The CEO of Epic Games didn't say much about the power of the components themselves, but rather about how they interact with each other within the PS5's own system. Just today we saw how the technical demo of Unreal Engine 5 had been captured directly from a console, using the system's own recording tools, with a highly impressive result. For its part, Sony has stressed again that the launch of PS5 is still slated for the end of 2020.
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