Wednesday, May 13th 2020
Epic Games Gives Mesmerizing Look at Unreal Engine 5 Running Real Time on PlayStation 5
Epic Games has just released a trailer for version 5 of their industry/acclaimed Unreal Engine. Dubbed "Lumen in the Land of Nanite", the demo they've shared is nothing short of mindblowing when it comes to the amount of environment and character detail. Unreal Engine 5 will feature a new geometry processing engine Epic is calling Nanite, which the company promises will virtually eliminate polygon budgets for developers, with automatic stream and scaling, thus eliminating the need to develop LOD levels for particular assets. Another addition, and an as impressive one, is the Lumen global illumination engine, which will save developers the need to manually bake lightmaps accounting for every little change in a scene's lighting - the global illumination system makes these changes in lighting conditions as seamless and integrated as they can be. This among other features already introduced with version 4.25 such as Niagara VFX and Chaos destruction systems.
Unreal Engine 5 is pegged for an early 2021 release; Epic Games has already announced they will be porting their popular Fortnite videogame into the engine, which makes sense, considering it's being particularly optimized for PC and next-generation consoles. These will become the backbone of games development - and an important source of Epic's Fortnite revenue stream. Take a look at the trailer after the break - and remember this was all running real-time in a PlayStation 5 console.
Source:
Epic Games
Unreal Engine 5 is pegged for an early 2021 release; Epic Games has already announced they will be porting their popular Fortnite videogame into the engine, which makes sense, considering it's being particularly optimized for PC and next-generation consoles. These will become the backbone of games development - and an important source of Epic's Fortnite revenue stream. Take a look at the trailer after the break - and remember this was all running real-time in a PlayStation 5 console.
This demo previews two of the new core technologies that will debut in Unreal Engine 5:
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.
Numerous teams and technologies have come together to enable this leap in quality. To build large scenes with Nanite geometry technology, the team made heavy use of the Quixel Megascans library, which provides film-quality objects up to hundreds of millions of polygons. To support vastly larger and more detailed scenes than previous generations, PlayStation 5 provides a dramatic increase in storage bandwidth.
The demo also showcases existing engine systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering.
123 Comments on Epic Games Gives Mesmerizing Look at Unreal Engine 5 Running Real Time on PlayStation 5
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The first engine that looks like actual CGI. Well done. Now get it in game.
wccftech.com/unreal-engine-5-playstation-5-demo/
It is next generation by any means.
Re the below pic for example, I simultaneously thought how awesome it would be to encounter this in game -- particularly if the sound work was just as good to provide a proper, in-person sort of feel -- but then also considered how perhaps unrealistic it would be to expect this level of craftsmanship throughout the game.
It's interesting to me how the more realistic human depictions are in game, the more ... meh they feel to me rather than being some abstract, in game, larger-than-life character.
This game character, for example, feels like the kind of girl I'd sit next to in uni for some poli sci elective or some such.
and this paradigm-change shows that UE4 will not be updated forever as the last unreal engine, like propagated since its launch
there will always be an even cleverer approach, thats evolutionary progress
so the baking an faking will go away and the pure material and creation work stays, how it should´ve been from the beginning, decades ago, but the machines weren´t stong enough... but now it becomes reality
/s :D
Anyone else get a savage next generation Lara croft adventure vibe, I look forward to it.
the amount of ray and rebound that current (and next gen console) hardware can launch is still very limited.
So don't expect full ray-traced with this gen. But in few years, performances will probably be good enough to leverage it a bit more. It's the future so it's not dead on arrival, it's just that it require a huge amount of calculation.
Also there are many others things that will increase graphic fidelity and this demo demonstrate it. Without ray-tracing, they are able to get incredible visual quality. Can't wait to see this in actual video games. The Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry is will help immensely to increase visual fidelity because even with ray-tracing, polygons remain the foundation of 3d. Light come after and light depend on the polygons to render properly.
Consoles are on par with computers too.
somewhere in a milky way, about a decade ago and ON PLAYSTATION 3, yeah, they are this shameless:
www.geeks3d.com/20110309/unreal-engine-3-official-dx11-samaritan-demo/