We’ve seen the specs, we’ve heard the pitches – but what we haven’t experienced is any demonstration of a genuine next-gen vision. That changes today with Epic Games’ reveal of Unreal Engine 5, accompanied by an astonishing tech demo confirmed as running in real-time on PlayStation 5 hardware. The promise is immense with the quality and density of the visuals on display almost defying belief. Imagine a game world where geometric detail is unlimited, with no pop-in and huge draw distances. Now picture this unprecedented level of fidelity backed up by real-time global illumination that’s fully dynamic. It sounds too good to be true, but watch the video on this page and that’s what’s on display. This is next-gen and it’s enormously exciting.
With Unreal Engine 5, Epic is looking to free developers from the constraints of poly counts and draw calls, to allow artists to simply drop in their full-fidelity ZBrush models and photogrammetry data. There’s no need for simplifying models to hit performance targets, no need for LOD generation. The new UE5 system – dubbed Nanite – takes care of it for you. Meanwhile, full dynamic global illumination via Epic’s new Lumen technology ensures accurate lighting of the scene with phenomenal realism.
What kind of detail levels are we talking about here? The ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ demo includes a close-up on a statue built from 33 million triangles with 8K textures. It’s displayed at maximum fidelity within the scene, with no developer input required. Moving into the next room, the demo wows us with almost 500 of those same statues in place (485 to be precise), all displayed at the same maximum quality. That’s 16 billion triangles in total, running smoothly in-scene. It sounds impossible, but what next-gen delivers are the tools to deliver on an age-old rendering vision that seemed unattainable – until now. Along with other media outlets, we were pre-briefed by Epic Games and had the chance to put questions to CEO Tim Sweeney, CTO Kim Libreri and VP of engineering, Nick Penwarden.
“You know, the philosophy behind it goes back to the 1980s with the idea of REYES: Render Everything Your Eye Sees,” says Tim Sweeney. “It’s a funny acronym which means that given essentially infinite detail available, it’s the engine’s job to determine exactly what pixels need to be drawn in order to display it. It doesn’t mean drawing all 10 billion polygons every frame because some of them are much, much smaller than the pixel. It means being able to render and an approximation of it which misses none of the detail that you’re able to perceive and once you get to that point, you’re done with geometry. There’s nothing more you can do. And if you rendered more polygons, you wouldn’t notice it because they just contribute infinitesimally to each pixel on the screen.”
Put simply, the scene renders through UE5 on a triangle-per-pixel basis with the user seeing only what he/she needs to see. It sounds preposterously simple, but it’s the culmination of over three years’ worth of research and development headed up by Epic Games’ technical director of graphics, Brian Karis. UE5 – on next-gen at least – is the realisation of the micro-polygon engine, and despite being demonstrated on PlayStation 5 specifically, Unreal Engine 5 is a cross-platform endeavour, just like its predecessors.