Here’s the First Real Look at Next-Gen Gaming with the Stunning Unreal Engine 5 #UE5

So like an RKO out of nowhere, Epic Games released a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 which is set to release next year and it gave us the best indication yet, as to what next-gen gaming will look like and it was quite stunning to say the least.  The tech demo dubbed “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” is not pre-rendered and the demo is running in real-time on the PS5 with an unseen person using a controller.  Oh and if you can, make sure you can watch the demo video in 4K.

The various take away’s from the demo was the new Lumen light tech, which takes lighting to the next level and will interact in real-time with what goes on-screen.  Even smaller details such as dust particles passing through the lighting from the crumbling rocks seen in the demo were amazing and I can only image at this time how great it will look with games that feature fully destructible environments.  We also got to see the poly assets to make up the textures of the environments which can and will be used in high budget movies, as well as of course, videogames.

Also the mesh used to create environments brings an unparalleled level of detail featuring literally billions of ‘Triangles’ that makes up a single scene, and as demonstrated by Epic Games’ Director of Graphics Brian Karis and Special Projects Art Director Jerome Platteaux, when the screen filter is switched to show the insane amount of Triangles used, the screen looks like static noise.

 

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeny added extra insight to the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo when speaking to The Verge, he praised the PS5’s GPU power and SSD.  While this is a tech demo and of course not a full game, it naturally used less memory to process all the data, in comparison to a full sized game, but Sweeny said that the PS5 “has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management,” and that its “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”.

In terms of the PS5’s SSD and after working with Sony “for quite some time on storage”, the PS5 storage 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 ]and that the PC market is] going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.”  It’s worth perhaps keeping in mind that while this tech may be superior at launch to what is currently available on PC, overtime as it always does, the PC tech will evolve and likely overtake next-gen console tech at some point.

In my humble opinion, the tech demo was simply stunning and it does give us the best insight to the kind of next-gen level we can expect to see, though it may not happen right away for full-sized games to reach the level seen in the demo, but I don’t think we’ll be that far off at launch.  Either way, this less than 10 minute demo has put to shame the next-gen gameplay reveal from Inside Xbox last week.  It must also be said that this software is not exclusive to PS5, as it will be implemented for games on Xbox Series X and PC.

With that all said and seen, is anyone else excited for a next-gen Tomb Raider game now?  Also keep a look out this week for a more in-depth analysis of the Unreal Engine 5 demo from our residential dev expert, Harris Iqbal.