Epic Games have unveiled their first step into the next generation of consoles, with the official announcement of Unreal Engine 5, the new version of their engine built for next-gen consoles. A real-time tech demo showcasing the capabilities of the engine – running on a PS5 – has also been shown off, which you can view below. Without a doubt, it looks very impressive.
One of the biggest new advancements Unreal Engine 5 introduces is Lumen, which is the engine’s system for real-time dynamic global illumination. It reacts to changes in the scene and in the geometry, and boasts diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in large environments across large distances.
Improved geometry is something else the new engine emphasizes, allowing developers to make use of film-quality assets within games themselves, which can carry up to hundreds of millions of polygons. “Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets,” Epic explains. “There is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.”
Other systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering are also shown in the tech demo. You can take a look below.
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