Unreal Engine 5 is nothing short of Unreal.
The next generation gaming engine shows off a real-time demo running on a Playstation 5. And it’s gorgeous.
Ever wondered what the future of game engines are going to look like? Stop and look no further. This is the current state of affairs, the ball of wax, nine yards.
Before we even get going you need to watch the 9 min demo and see for yourself. I know the word awesome is overused, but this is awesome.
Let’s unpack some parts.
Tri/Polygon count is no longer a thing (I know it might have already been like that for a while) it’s definitely not at thing any more. There are billions and billions of source triangles in these scenes. With 8k textures. Nanite is dynamically taking all these billions of triangles, and in real-time converts them to 20 million or so drawn triangles. What does that look like?
This is absurd, this is not pre-baked or a film you saw, thats a real-time game engine simulating an environment with real-time lighting and realtime physics. All running smoothly. This is the future. We can start to question our own reality given that our computer graphics started with Pong not that long ago (1972 to be exact).
Let’s have a look at them rocks again, these are individual elements in the environment. Assets normally used in the movie industry. This takes photorealistic games to a whole new level of madness. Who will build the first global replica of earth in 1:1 scale (not you Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020). But someone else, and using the mega scans library to make it realistic enough that we can all voyuer there and live out our lives in virtual. (not looking at you Upload).
Dynamic light — Lumin
Let’s just scratch our heads here, not only are there literally billions of triangles everywhere, scattered, reacting and looking gorgeous there is also dynamic lighting that makes all of these assets react to it in real-time? Someone better call Elon and ask him about simulation theory because I think we might be in one after seeing this.
We could probably spend hours talking about dynamic lighting. Whats impresses me the most here is that this is running of a PS5 and not some 2000w, water cooled gaming rig with 2 graphics cards. But the next generation console. This is mind bending.
Sound
Convolution Reverb, allows unreal engine to measure reverberation characteristics of real spaces to then use the recorded samples to reproduce sound in the virtual space. Then there is sound field rendering. That allows for better spatialized audio. In short, Audio will get a whole new dimension in UE5. And with VR grabbing more and more ground, this is going to be interesting to follow.
Niagra Particle System
With the use of machine learning, and AI the new particle system has become a lot smarter, where particles within the system now can talk to each other and sense one another better than ever before. This will most likely have great impact in more realistic particle systems, environments, and additions to these environments.
Chaos Physics & destruction System
There are so many aspects to the new engine, that digging in to the new physics system will be something that will need a lot of attention and deep dives in the next couple of months. It builds on what we have seen from the 4.23 release and onwards.
Putting it all together.
Looking at Lumin, the new insane poly-count, and the animation upgrades — it’s hard to forget you are watching a real-time demo of game play and not some CGI scene from a Hollywood movie. The light reacts to the rigid bodies in the environment too, as we can see in the section where the cave falls in.
It’s hard to comprehend what impacts on gaming and CG work this will have. We already knew there was some pretty dope photo realism being done with Unreal, like the insane set of the Star Wars Mandalorian.
Quixel and Megascans assets together with the new UE5 will most likely take games to never before seen heights. If you for some reason thought games and real-time computer graphics could not look better, well we just got shown that it can.
33 million triangles in one model.
This part of the demo is potentially one of the most impressive parts, you think when you see it for the first time, just to realise they then put an additional five hundred of these models in an even larger scene comprising of over 15 billion triangles, without breaking a sweat. I mean come on. 15.000.000.000 triangles. I have issues with my 35 million triangle photogrammetry scans…
While this game aesthetics is far from the cartoony style we see in popular games such as Fortnight and Valorant. It’s definitely something we can come to expect from future tripple A games built on UE5.
Conclusion
This is still very much early days of UE5, we have seen an impressive, jaw dropping demo, launching Epic into the stratosphere when it comes to owning the next generation game engine space.
These announcements are not just small improvements but paradigm shifts in computational output, mainly sovled with smart software and not more powerful hardware.
It will be interesting to start plotting some advancements here onto the Moores Law curve, because I’m having this itchy sensation that we just broke the Moores Law curve, but simple adding more software. Having a scene with billions of triangles, and real-time light running of a console with smooth gameplay, just now seems like sorcery of the highest level.
What will a 2000w overpowered gaming rig be able to output 1 year from now when running the UE5 engine at warp settings?
I’ve never been this excited about a game engine ever before.
Kudos to Epic and everyone that has been working on this, it’s absolutely amazing, and you should all be very proud.
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