A few days ago Microsoft, which had been doing so well with its marketing of the Xbox Series X, stumbled when its promised first look at gameplay from third party titles running on the new console didn’t actually appear to show any gameplay.
Instead it showed game cinematics from various upcoming titles – some quite impressive, but a good portion of it looked similar to current gen titles. The presentation was widely criticised, Xbox itself acknowledging the fumble, as many have been keenly waiting to see what a real ‘next gen’ game looks like. They didn’t get it that day.
Today though they have, and it’s thanks to the fifth iterations of both the PlayStation and the Unreal Engine. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has just unveiled “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” a video of a real-time demo using Unreal Engine 5 and running live on a PlayStation 5 console and this definitely looks next gen.
Unreal says in its blog post that one of the goals in the next generation is “to achieve photorealism on par with movie CG and real life, and put it within practical reach of development teams of all sizes through highly productive tools and content libraries.”
To do this there’s two big new pieces of core technology. The first is “nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry” which allows artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see and use “film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine… nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.”
The other is “Lumen”, a fully dynamic global illumination solution that “immediately reacts to scene and light changes – rendering diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters”. A designer can change a light source and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly – no lightmap bake delays.
Sony has touted how storage, storage bandwidth and load times are a key feature of the PS5 and Unreal says it’s key here in order to “support vastly larger and more detailed scenes than previous generations”. Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021 and will support next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
Here’s the clip released below, jump to 1min 20 secs to get past the handsome boys with beards and see the footage for yourself.
Source: Unreal Engine
