What we saw in the technical demonstration that Epic Games did with the future Unreal Engine 5 was really remarkable. The quality of the visual experience made a fantastic leap and it posed a future in which games will go even further than we thought in this section.
A priori it seemed that this demanded enormous hardware resources, but an Epic Games manager has confessed that apparently that demo is just a snack: During its execution, the load of the graphics card was very low, and compared it to the load that Fortnite requires today, a game that many computers on the market —including those without dedicated graphics— can run smoothly without problems.
Promises, promises?
Nick Penwarden, head of engineering for Unreal Engine 5, was making those comments in an interview with PCGamesN. This executive stated that “the GPU time spent on rendering the geometry in our UE5 demo is similar to that used in rendering Fortnite geometry running at 60 fps on consoles. “
It is true that he only spoke of geometry and not of other elements such as lighting, shadows or reflections of the scene, but that this section consumes as much as Fortnite’s geometry seems to make clear that the GPU has plenty of leeway to deal with all those elements that complete each scene.
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As explained in PCGamesN, the rendering of the geometry is not the only relevant component when it comes to obtaining the performance of the games, but certainly responsible for much of the entire work cycle of the “graphic pipeline”.
For these analysts the conclusion is clear: the future is the optimization of software, not hardware. They gave the example of NVIDIA and its DLSS 2.0: This artificial intelligence system generates an anti-aliasing with an exceptional quality thanks to the analysis of the running game – it requires intensive prior training, yes – and it may be that UE5 marks another effort in that regard.
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In fact, the new Unreal Engine 5 engine poses with statements like that a remarkable visual leap not so much for teams with very powerful hardware, but precisely the opposite: more modest teams may be able to access a visual experience that until now was off limits to them.
UE5’s Nanite technology therefore seems to promise that games that use it will be able to offer an exceptional graphic level without demanding so much as we thought of our teams, making those experiences available to more modest teams.
At Epic Games they indicated that this demo was running on a PS5 but no details have been given of the actual load of the GPU on said console. Without these data it is impossible to know if the statement of the Epic Games manager is not too optimistic, but we are very afraid that we will have to be patient to verify it: we will probably not see games using this engine until at least the end of 2021.
Track | PCGamesN
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