PS5 IS UNREAL

Epic Games demos Unreal Engine 5 in real time on PlayStation 5. Take your first look at the next gen in action

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She walks firmly into a craggy canyon and the camera pans around and zooms in on the rocks to our left, which look tangibly real. Though she’s performing the moves of a familiar tomb-raiding icon, scurrying, and clambering about the photoreal world, this is no game. This is Epic Games showcasing Unreal Engine 5, the new toolset almost every developer will tap into in the next generation, and it’s running in real-time on PlayStation 5. This is a tease of what Sony’s next-gen can achieve.

One of Epic Games’ goals is to deliver the kind of photorealism we’ve become accustomed to in film CG and VFX. The broader aim is to ensure every developer of any size can get these results.

“EVERY DEVELOPER OF ANY SIZE CAN GET THESE RESULTS.”

We’re back in the demo running on PS5, called Lumen In The Land Of Nanite, and we see our heroine pull herself up a sandy ledge, dust herself down, and the fine flecks sprinkle into the wind, light dancing off them as they disperse. The camera pans up, and above looms an ornate temple dappled by sunlight that realistically picks out spots of metal glinting from the ancient rocky forms.

The world looks real and tangible thanks to new tech Epic Games calls “Nanite virtualized micro polygon geometry”. This new next-gen feature enables videogame artists to create as much geometric detail in a scene as the eye can see; this means film-quality models and art that would normally be optimized and reduced in detail to work in a game can simply be imported and run – that’s art made of billions of polygons imported into UnrealEngine-5-powered games on PS5.