Epic Games Gives Mesmerizing Look at Unreal Engine 5 Running Real Time on PlayStation 5

[Raevenlord]

Epic Games has just released a trailer for version 5 of their industry/acclaimed Unreal Engine. Dubbed "Lumen in the Land of Nanite", the demo they've shared is nothing short of mindblowing when it comes to the amount of environment and character detail. Unreal Engine 5 will feature a new geometry processing engine Epic is calling Nanite, which the company promises will virtually eliminate polygon budgets for developers, with automatic stream and scaling, thus eliminating the need to develop LOD levels for particular assets. Another addition, and an as impressive one, is the Lumen global illumination engine, which will save developers the need to manually bake lightmaps accounting for every little change in a scene's lighting - the global illumination system makes these changes in lighting conditions as seamless and integrated as they can be. This among other features already introduced with version 4.25 such as Niagara VFX and Chaos destruction systems.

Unreal Engine 5 is pegged for an early 2021 release; Epic Games has already announced they will be porting their popular Fortnite videogame into the engine, which makes sense, considering it's being particularly optimized for PC and next-generation consoles. These will become the backbone of games development - and an important source of Epic's Fortnite revenue stream. Take a look at the trailer after the break - and remember this was all running real-time in a PlayStation 5 console.

Unreal Engine 5 Feature Highlights | Next-Gen Real-Time Demo Running on PlayStation 5

This demo previews two of the new core technologies that will debut in Unreal Engine 5:
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means 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—and it just works. 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.

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.

Numerous teams and technologies have come together to enable this leap in quality. To build large scenes with Nanite geometry technology, the team made heavy use of the Quixel Megascans library, which provides film-quality objects up to hundreds of millions of polygons. To support vastly larger and more detailed scenes than previous generations, PlayStation 5 provides a dramatic increase in storage bandwidth.

The demo also showcases existing engine systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Vayra86]

G
T
F
O

The first engine that looks like actual CGI. Well done. Now get it in game.

 

[ARF]

According to the Epic founder, this is actually the realization of a concept that stretches way back to decades ago.

You know, the philosophy behind it goes back to the 1980s with the idea of REYES: Render Everything Your Eye Sees. 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.

Unreal Engine 5 Demo Is Rendering at 1440P Most of the Time on PS5; RTX 2070 Super Could Run It at 'Pretty Good Performance'

Epic shared a lot of information on the stunning Unreal Engine 5 demo, such as the rendering resolution on PS5 and how well would PC run it.

wccftech.com

Unreal Engine 5 Demoed on PlayStation 5, Amazing New Lighting and Modeling Tech Shown

Get a tantalizing taste of what the PlayStation 5 and Unreal Engine 5 is capable of in this incredible next-gen graphical showcase!

wccftech.com

Unreal Engine 5 - Official PS5 Real-Time Tech Demo

 

[Lionheart]

68% Don't think this is next gen, 34 people have voted, everyone's entitled to their opinion & here's mine.... Are you f..king BLIND?

 

[xrobwx71]

Wow, beautiful. I can't wait to see it on my machine.

 

[Cranky5150]

Pretty F'in impressive TBH....

 

[sounreal]

G
T
F
O

The first engine that looks like actual CGI. Well done. Now get it in game.

Im with you put it in a game.

 

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

This looks...unreal

 

[dyonoctis]

I wonder what the 68% are actually expecting from next gen ? I mean okay, the star wars demo is insane, but it didn't showed a huge and detailed environement.

 

[Ferrum Master]

No one said next gen should look like night and day.

It is next generation by any means.

 

[DrCR]

The first engine that looks like actual CGI. Well done. Now get it in game.

My concern would be to have this in game would require too great of an investment in art assets.

Re the below pic for example, I simultaneously thought how awesome it would be to encounter this in game -- particularly if the sound work was just as good to provide a proper, in-person sort of feel -- but then also considered how perhaps unrealistic it would be to expect this level of craftsmanship throughout the game.

It's interesting to me how the more realistic human depictions are in game, the more ... meh they feel to me rather than being some abstract, in game, larger-than-life character.

This game character, for example, feels like the kind of girl I'd sit next to in uni for some poli sci elective or some such.

 

[_Flare]

finally the first baking-less gameengine, this is honorably really BIG
and this paradigm-change shows that UE4 will not be updated forever as the last unreal engine, like propagated since its launch
there will always be an even cleverer approach, thats evolutionary progress

so the baking an faking will go away and the pure material and creation work stays, how it should´ve been from the beginning, decades ago, but the machines weren´t stong enough... but now it becomes reality

 

[ARF]

68% Don't think this is next gen, 34 people have voted, everyone's entitled to their opinion & here's mine.... Are you f..king BLIND?

Maybe they don't realise that this is a REVOLUTION in PC graphics

This demo previews two of the new core technologies that will debut in Unreal Engine 5:
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means 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—and it just works. 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.

This must be the same technology as by Euclideon Holographics

Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]

 

[1d10t]

We already had "this" like years, its called cut-scene or FMV.


/s

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Maybe they don't realise that this is a REVOLUTION in PC graphics



This must be the same technology as by Euclideon Holographics

Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]

Not sure,. Euclidean use voxels ,I'm sure they would have references to voxels if it was, possibly a generational evolution of tesselation.

Anyone else get a savage next generation Lara croft adventure vibe, I look forward to it.

 

[Vya Domus]

The first engine that looks like actual CGI. Well done. Now get it in game.

Northlight from Remedy looked quite convincingly CGI back in 2016.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

So no mention of Ray tracing? Is that DOA tech now then?

 

[ARF]

So no mention of Ray tracing? Is that DOA tech now then?

AMD works with "select lighting effects" as in

Lumen

is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.

 

[Punkenjoy]

Next Gen console will have Ray-Tracing capability but dev will need to use it with parcimony to not kill the performance.

the amount of ray and rebound that current (and next gen console) hardware can launch is still very limited.

So don't expect full ray-traced with this gen. But in few years, performances will probably be good enough to leverage it a bit more. It's the future so it's not dead on arrival, it's just that it require a huge amount of calculation.

Also there are many others things that will increase graphic fidelity and this demo demonstrate it. Without ray-tracing, they are able to get incredible visual quality. Can't wait to see this in actual video games. The Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry is will help immensely to increase visual fidelity because even with ray-tracing, polygons remain the foundation of 3d. Light come after and light depend on the polygons to render properly.

 

[Decryptor009]

I am not really optimistic that visuals will get much better now if at all, this is where we truly hit walls.

Consoles are on par with computers too.

 

[ARF]

Next Gen console will have Ray-Tracing capability but dev will need to use it with parcimony to not kill the performance.

the amount of ray and rebound that current (and next gen console) hardware can launch is still very limited.

So don't expect full ray-traced with this gen. But in few years, performances will probably be good enough to leverage it a bit more. It's the future so it's not dead on arrival, it's just that it require a huge amount of calculation.

Also there are many others things that will increase graphic fidelity and this demo demonstrate it. Without ray-tracing, they are able to get incredible visual quality. Can't wait to see this in actual video games. The Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry is will help immensely to increase visual fidelity because even with ray-tracing, polygons remain the foundation of 3d. Light come after and light depend on the polygons to render properly.

I think that future graphics cards will evolve around their ray-tracing performance since all cards starting from RDNA2 will be able to do the "Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry" or so small "triangles" so that we call it infinite detail.

 

[medi01]

G
T
F
O

The first engine that looks like actual CGI. Well done. Now get it in game.

somewhere in a milky way, about a decade ago and ON PLAYSTATION 3, yeah, they are this shameless:

Unreal Engine 3 - GDC 2011: Samaritan Real-Time Tech Demo (2011) UE3 | FULL-HD

 

[Decryptor009]

somewhere in a milky way, about a decade ago and ON PLAYSTATION 3, yeah, they are this shameless:

Unreal Engine 3 - GDC 2011: Samaritan Real-Time Tech Demo (2011) UE3 | FULL-HD

This was on GTX 580 not PS3. Get your facts right.

Unreal Engine 3: Official DX11 Samaritan Demo | Geeks3D

Unreal Engine 3: Official DX11 Samaritan Demo

www.geeks3d.com

 

[ARF]

I am not really optimistic that visuals will get much better now if at all, this is where we truly hit walls.

Consoles are on par with computers too.

How is a console on par with a 64-core Threadripper or a 16-core Ryzen, and Radeon RX 5700 XT, or future Navi 21 that is as large as 505 sq. mm ?

 

[MxPhenom 216]

I am not really optimistic that visuals will get much better now if at all, this is where we truly hit walls.

Consoles are on par with computers too.

LOL no, no they are not.