Special Wednesday Showcase has just revealed the new Unreal Engine 5 with gameplay demo running on a PlayStation 5. The astonishing capabilities of the new engine, matched with the PlayStation 5 hardware, allows developers to create photo-realistic scenes that defines a clear line between current gen and next gen.
The Unreal Engine 5 engine was revealed by Technical Director of Graphics, Brian Karis and Special Projects Art Director, Jerome Platteaux as they introduced an in-depth look at “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” , the purpose of this demo was to showcasing two new core technologies that will debut in Unreal Engine 5: Nanite and Lumen.
Check the Unreal Engine 5-PlayStation 5 demo here:
Unreal Engine 5 introduces Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry technology that allows the creation of as much “geometric detail as the eye can see.” Brian Karis explains that Nanite has allowed the Epic Games Team to display a million triangles in just a portion of what’s been displayed on screen, over a billion triangles of source geometry can be displayed in each frame.
“Thanks to virtual texturing, they all use 8K texture as well” Said Karis at the technical reveal of the Unreal Engine 5 demo running on PlayStation 5. The console can output such amazing graphic fidelity thanks to Nanite geometry, which is streamed and scaled in real time. Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination technology that immediately reacts to scene and light changes.
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 erases the need to wait for light-map 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.
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