On Wednesday, Epic Games unveiled Unreal Engine 5, which it says will unleash the power of next-generation machines. To drive the point home, the developers provided a « first look » of the engine running on a PlayStation 5 (below).
On Wednesday, Epic Games unveiled Unreal Engine 5, which it says will unleash the power of next-generation machines. To drive the point home, the developers provided a « first look » of the engine running on a PlayStation 5 (below).
Epic’s tech demo is called « Lumen in the Land of Nanite, » named after two new technologies coming to Unreal Engine — Nanite and Lumen. The Tomb Raideresque real-time game demo highlights how the latest core technologies can bring cinema-level CG to console games with near photorealistic graphical fidelity.
Nanite is a « micropolygon geometry » that Epic claims produces triangles at the size of a pixel. The technology allows developers to use assets in Unreal Engine containing millions or even billions of polygons without hits to performance. It points to a statue within the demo that is comprised of 33 million triangles.
« No baking of normal maps, no authored LODs, » the engineers explain.
They then go on to show a room containing 500 of the same statue, each at the same level of detail. That makes for around 16.5 billion triangles in the scene, not including the room geometry — all this, with no discernable lag or frame-rate hits running on a PS5.
Furthermore, developers can easily import these high-poly assets (up to 8K) from whatever tools they use.
« 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, » said Epic in its press release.
