Unreal Engine 4.25 Released Featuring Beta Support for Next Generation Consoles

[Raevenlord]

EPIC Games has announced that a new version of its industry-spanning Unreal Engine is now available. Version 4.25 adds Beta support for development specifically geared for upcoming, next generation Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles, thus allowing non-first-party studios to accelerate their development on the platform using the tried and true Unreal game engine. Part of this support includes development modules for next-gen audio features - remember these consoles will feature hardware-accelerated audio that's supposed to kick audio development in games towards the next gear.

It remains to be seen what exactly developers will be ready to achieve, but has consoles become the most common development dominator for upcoming games, their specs will definitely facilitate advancements in game development for the future. High core-count CPUs and GPUs, right alongside high-speed storage in the form of NVMe-based systems will now become the norm, which means us PC gamers will also reap some benefits from these development requirements. Version 4.25 of the Unreal Engine also adds production-ready support for Niagara VFX (used for water animations), as well as for the Chaos physics and destruction system that is already employed in Fortnite. New shading capabilities are also in store for developers.



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[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Yeah, well, it seems to me that anyone who is still using spinning rust to store their games is going to have to at least use a SATAIII SSD for games from now on. One of the lowest common denominators USED to be consoles with respect to the hardware, but it seems to me that the new consoles will have better hardware than probably 50% of PCs.

 

[ShurikN]

Yeah, well, it seems to me that anyone who is still using spinning rust to store their games is going to have to at least use a SATAIII SSD for games from now on. One of the lowest common denominators USED to be consoles with respect to the hardware, but it seems to me that the new consoles will have better hardware than probably 50% of PCs.

50% is an understatement. PS5 will have storage faster then 99.9% of the PC market, the rest being Optane. Then again we might get some faster PCIe 4.0 nvme drives before PS5 launches.

 

[delshay]

Does anyone know of any game that has Vulkan API using the Unreal Engine.

 

[dyonoctis]

Tomorow we'll get a peak at the new gen consoles capabilities. I'm really interested in this gen. Last gen was all about making compromise, when this time around they went nuts. 1Tb of fast storage even by pci-e 4 standards ? Zen 2 cpu ? New gpu's that aren't available on the desktop market yet ?

 

[ShurikN]

Does anyone know of any game that has Vulkan API using the Unreal Engine.

Life Is Strange 2

 

[Vayra86]

Tomorow we'll get a peak at the new gen consoles capabilities. I'm really interested in this gen. Last gen was all about making compromise, when this time around they went nuts. 1Tb of fast storage even by pci-e 4 standards ? Zen 2 cpu ? New gpu's that aren't available on the desktop market yet ?

Yeah I kinda do like what I am seeing too.

If they can make some visionary choices on how input devices should work and whether homebrew OS should work, we could have ourselves some real winners here. The latter will probably not happen, but even so if its a capable HTPC allrounder as well... man. That is fast becoming attractive. And if I could run a light Windows version on the Xbox... pfew...

 

[Punkenjoy]

Console not released yet being more powerful than 50% of the PC is probably the bare minimum. The will always be, when they will be released, what would be the situation. People will be able to buy better computer hardware at that time so...

As for PS5 storage. we will see what the real performance of the storage is. The numbers displayed currently are probably raw sequencial performance (and compress altought they will have a chip to handle that).

The difference right now between a PCI-E 4.0 SSD and a SATA SSD in random access is not that huge and the performance drop drasticly.

That is a critical point that we will need to know to really see how this will have an impact. If the random access performance is low, this mean the SSD will only used to load quickly assets in memory. Probably in background to avoid loading screen. Assets will probably be packaged to maximize the read performance.

In that case, computer right now without NVME might have lags, slowdown etc, during gameplay. It remain to be seen how current pci-e (NVME) SSD will behave but i do not think that it's the end of the world.

That also make a lot of sense on console where the memory will be limited. On PC, we will see soon 32GB+ of system memory and the next gen of GPU might have 16 GB+ of memory. PC will be able to hold more data in memory where a console with limited memory might need to purge and load data on the fly. This will increase this generation of console longevity but it's not the thing that will kill PC.

I just do not trust the scenario where that SSD would have crazy random access performance. If it was the case, that would mean the SSD could be used to store data used every frame. But that won't be the case. SSD latency are calculated in microsecond where memory latency is calculated in nanosecond. Also the gap between 1 TB/s with nanosecond access time vs 10 GB/s with microsecond access time.

If sony had a miracle SSD that had super low latency with high random access performance, they could just sell it all over the place in the server/datacenter market and make huge money. That is not the case.

In the end, it's true that most PC gamer currently will need to upgrade to run future PS5 games. But so do current PS4 owner lol. I do not see that as a huge issue. You want next gen performance, buy next gen gear...

 

[BorgOvermind]

9 out of 10 games I played in 2019 used Unreal Engine.
Too bad UT4 is kind of abandoned since 2017.
Unreal Engine was and still is a strong favorite of both devs and gamers.