Last May Epic Games attracted the spotlight after presenting an impressive technical demo Unreal Engine 5, your next next-gen graphics engine running on a PS5. If at that time we believed that Epic had squeezed the full potential of its graphics engine on the Sony console, today they come out again to tell us that this was just the beginning.
As part of a statement to PCGamesN, Nick Penwarden, Vice President of Engineering at Unreal Engine 5, took the opportunity to raise the hype, again, by ensuring that what we saw with the technical demo was how to move Fortnite on PS4 or Xbox One. That is, something “normal”.
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There’s still a lot to squeeze
Penwarden mentioned that the goal they are looking for with Unreal Engine 5 is “achieve photorealism on par with a CGI movie and even real life”. But the most impressive thing is what he said about the technical demo:
“I can say that the time the GPU spent rendering geometry in our UE5 demo is similar to Fortnite’s rendering power of geometry, which runs at 60fps on consoles.”
That is, as Penwarden explains, What we saw in the technical demo did not require much rendering power from the PS5, and even compared it to what they currently do with ‘Fortnite’ on consoles at 60 fps, which in theory is basic. Also here it should be noted that ‘Fortnite’ is very well optimized and is capable of running even with few technical requirements. Come on, we don’t need the best CPU or GPU to have a satisfying experience.
Penwarden points out that in the demo we see the work of the engine, focused on its ability to reduce the load of polygons on an object to increase it when we are close enough. In fact, its new technology ‘Nanite‘is the one that takes care of this, and thus reduces the workload for the developer.
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In summary, it is not about the pure work of the GPU, Unreal Engine 5 with its rendering of the geometry is the one that would now be in charge of doing this work, so that the developer does not have to manually program the objects to use the LOD (level detail).
Everything translates into what has been shown so far, both in the technical demo and on the PS5, it has not been fully optimized nor have all the available power and resources been used, so we can expect more and better graphics. We will see if it is true.
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