First Unreal Engine 5 demo released

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Epic has released the first demo of the upcoming Unreal Engine 5 as video, running on a Playstation 5.

The two major innovations are a technic called Nanite, which basically optimises 3D models on the fly in the engine, so no need to optimise anything by hand any longer on texture size, polycounts and so on. The engine does that now for you on the fly, so you can even import movie grade 3D models into your game without any further need of editing.

The other is a global dynamic illumination system called Lumen. The video is best watched in full screen.

 

[Free]

They have a third innovation on the licensing side.

Unreal Engine is now royalty-free until a game makes a whopping $1 million

New royalty-free period, which is retroactive, has grown by a factor of 20 in 9 years.

arstechnica.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

1. That's nucking finsane

2. Video: "look at all these 8K textures"
My 1080p monitor:

3. I really really like this "Lumen", because screw process-intensive "ray-tracing" and the prohibitively-priced hardware needed to run it

4. LOL no need to optimize or retopologize mesh for games? No more need to bake normal maps or gloss maps? HAHAHAHA that's funny. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome if true, but I'll believe it when I see it actually happening on Joe Shmoe's computer and not a preproduced and edited tech demo on a closed system. I'm keeping my expectations low so that if I'm surprised it can only be in a good way.

5. No need to worry about texture memory? 8k textures for every rock, with the engine adaptively scaling them as needed in realtime? Very impressive from a technical standpoint, although I wonder how console players will like taking a week to download one freaking game

6. Environment artists rejoice! Character artists sorry you still need to retopologize your models for rigging ha ha suck it

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

What we have seen is the demo on a Playstation 5. The PS5 has not been released yet, but comes with some very specific hardware different from PC according to Sony/Epic, and the price tag will be somewhere around 499 US$ at least in the beginning.

So yes, it's impressive if the remarks are true.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

Unreal Engine 5 will also run on the Xbox Series X according to Epic Games. There were quite a few on Twitter claiming otherwise due it just being shown on the PS5.

There is rumor that the PS5 will be out in October instead of November like it has been at least during the last few generations.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Unreal Engine 5 is just the new game-authoring engine. It lives in the game code, not on the system itself, meaning It'll run on whatever system the game developer makes the game for whether that's PS5, Xbox, PC, or whatnot.

If the PS5 is coming out this fall, then it seems it won't have any UE5 games on it at launch, since the UE5 trailer says it's coming out sometime next year.

 

[Fionalein]

Unreal Engine 5 is just the new game-authoring engine. It lives in the game code, not on the system itself, meaning It'll run on whatever system the game developer makes the game for whether that's PS5, Xbox, PC, or whatnot.

If the PS5 is coming out this fall, then it seems it won't have any UE5 games on it at launch, since the UE5 trailer says it's coming out sometime next year.

The main improvement of the next console generations seems to be realtime raytracing - I expect a lot of titles relaunched that will be slower than the current titles but more eye candy.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

Unreal Engine 5 is just the new game-authoring engine. It lives in the game code, not on the system itself, meaning It'll run on whatever system the game developer makes the game for whether that's PS5, Xbox, PC, or whatnot.

If the PS5 is coming out this fall, then it seems it won't have any UE5 games on it at launch, since the UE5 trailer says it's coming out sometime next year.

Yeah but there are people out there that seem to be fixated on one piece of plastic and metal. They think that the gaming world revolves around that one device and that all the others are inferior. Some got really pissed off that Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to PC after first coming out on the PS4 a few years ago.

Yeah it'll be a year or so before the UE5 games come out.

The main improvement of the next console generations seems to be realtime raytracing - I expect a lot of titles relaunched that will be slower than the current titles but more eye candy.

Even now PC games can only use one feature of Raytracing. It'll probably be a few generations of video cards before all features of it can be used. Not sure how much raytracing consoles will be able to use but I doubt that they will use all of them at first or even for the upcoming generation.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The development of realtime raytracing isn't even that much of a priority given this announcement. UE5 is claiming to be able to produce very similar results without using raytracing at all, meaning UE5 would be able to produce these lighting effects on less-powerful cards. The PS5 for instance is using Radeon graphics, not Nvidia. It certainly would be nice to be able to have that kind of lighting without spending a small fortune on an RTX card. For players, that's the big reason to look forward to UE5 (the rest of the features won't really matter to them).