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.
