Unreal Engine 5 Announced, Real Time Demo Features Next Gen Tech Running on PS5 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 July 2020 / 3,204 Views
Epic Games has announced the next generation Unreal Engine, called Unreal Engine 5. With the announcement came a real-time demo showcasing next generation capabilities running on the PlayStation 5. Unreal Engine 5 has also been confirmed for Xbox Series X, Windows PC and mobile platforms.
Technical Director of Graphics Brian Karis and Special Projects Art Director Jerome Platteaux in the video provide an in-depth look at the demo, which they call Lumen in the Land of Nanite.
"Two new core technologies that will debut in [Unreal Engine 5], said Epic Games. Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry, which frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see, and Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes.
"Also present in the demo are next-gen features already available in Unreal Engine 4.25, such as Niagara VFX improvements, Chaos physics and destruction, animation system enhancements, and audio advancements. Unreal Engine 4.25 also includes support for next-gen consoles."
View the real-time demo below:
Read the announcement post below:
We’ve just released a first look at Unreal Engine 5. One of our goals in this next generation is to achieve photorealism on par with movie CG and real life, and put it within practical reach of development teams of all sizes through highly productive tools and content libraries.
Introducing Lumen in the Land of Nanite, a real-time demo running live on PlayStation 5.
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.
Unreal Engine 4 & 5 timeline
Unreal Engine 4.25 already supports next-generation console platforms from Sony and Microsoft, and Epic is working closely with console manufacturers and dozens of game developers and publishers using Unreal Engine 4 to build next-gen games.
Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
We’re designing for forward compatibility, so you can get started with next-gen development now in UE4 and move your projects to UE5 when ready.
We will release Fortnite, built with UE4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with our commitment to prove out industry-leading features through internal production, migrate the game to UE5 in mid-2021.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
this is what I expected from a next gen demo...... So much detail! its like a feast, you want to just pause and look at everything.
:O
This demo was just gorgeous and most of time looked like a movie.
Huge psychological and PR win to have Unreal Engine 5 demonstrated on PS5.
100%, this comeing out after the backlash from the xbox series x gameplay event, not showing any demos or gameplay.... has to be like a kick in the balls, for Xbox.
Don't worry we will soon learn why this was bad for Sony.
Very, very impressive. However, don't tech demos always look way better than actual games? Essentially Epic is advertising its engines for developers to use. I'm hyped, but I have a feeling it'll take a couple of years for games to look as good as this.
This is running realtime on PS5. While the ones shown for XSX last week were target renders, so this would at least be real thing (but sure since it is a very small thing and with few interaction they can crank up everything)
True but he's right that tech demos look better than games. It takes several years for games to catch up to them.
Yep you are right. It was just that since this is running realtime then the games could look like on the demo, but yes a very small segment with everything under control and devs being able to focus a lot on that small clip. So for most games it won't hit that demo. But I do expect Sony first parties to reach this level like in the first 2 or 3 years.
I think that both Sony and Microsoft first parties will come close to this but with many other systems running at the same time, such as AI and physics, there will be a CPU and/or GPU bottleneck that they'll have to work around.
Where's the new Unreal Tournament, Epic Games?
Lying dead in the pile with the rest of their games, that don't make Fortnite money. Even EG pretends their OG fornite doesn't exist, as it's still (years later) stuck in early access.
this is MUCH more impressive than anything Xbox showed for their Xbox Series X gameplay event!
Crazy, a demo for a new engine is more impressive than some early gen games from A or AA devs. Hope you just realize those games won't look any better on PS5 and that this demo also shows what's possible in Xbox
I don’t get how it would work on iOS or Android.
Assets can scale downward as well as up. The idea is to have one game development environment that can scale run on Android/iPhone thru to PCs and next-gen consoles (I don't know for sure about current-gen consoles - like they didn't mention if it would come to PS4/Xbox One and honestly I don't think it would be worth the effort).
It's already been confirmed for Switch :)
https://www.nintendo-insider.com/unreal-engine-5-will-support-nintendo-switch/
Probably some market deal for an upcoming game, or maybe some of the PS4 games that will go to Epic Store
In the (45 minute long!) interview after the demo, this was addressed. Epic said they have a very close working relationship with Sony and specifically the PS5, including early access to PS5 development kits. Now, obviously everything in the real-time demo is more than likely possible on Xbox Series X, but I think Epic is still sorta "shunning" Microsoft whenever they can because of the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 that, at least when it was initially released, MS tried to push it as the dedicated games store for Windows. Epic sees the PC as the "open" platform and hated the idea of Microsoft controlling the games digital store (none of this really matters now because the MS Store never even got close to competing with Steam/Epic Games Store/etc for marketshare).
