Unreal Engine 5 Announced

The team shared an incredible demo running on the PlayStation 5. The demo showcases what next-generation game consoles will be capable of. We get the power of GI, super realistic details, millions of triangles, physics, and more.

This demo previews two of the new core features coming to Unreal Engine 5:

The first is Nanite that allows artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. The team states that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine (anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data). Please note that Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real-time and there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets! You don't need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs, no loss in quality.

Lumen, the second big feature, is a fully dynamic global Illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system is said to render "diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters." 

Epic noted that they also made heavy use of the Quixel Megascans library to provide film-quality objects up to hundreds of millions of polygons. 

“The graphics speak for themselves. And Epic has always pushed the bleeding edge of what’s possible,” CEO Tim Sweeney told The Verge. “Our goal isn’t just to bring more features to developers. The hardest problem in game development right now is building high quality games takes enormous time and cost. So we want to make developers’ lives easier and more productive.”

Basically, we'll get incredible visual quality, amazing details, and photorealistic lighting with all the latest Unreal tools. The team promises a quantum leap, so here's our future of game dev. We're talking about any game projects, not just hyper-optimized tech demos. It will take some time for the full scope to be realized, but the whole thing is groundbreaking. 

“You can build a high-end console game and it can look fantastic and you can also make it work on smartphones, and you can build an audience far bigger than just the hardcore gaming audience by shipping it on more platforms,” Sweeney added. “The technology can enable that and make it more productive.” With its full launch in late 2021, Epic says UE5 will support next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

You can learn more here.