Unreal Engine 5
“Photorealistic” might be the word we usually use when we say we’re trying to achieve realistic graphics in-game, but “movie realistic” might be a better way to think of them. In a recent interview with the official PlayStation Magazine UK (via Video Games Chronicle), Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri received high praise for the upcoming Xbox Series X and PS5, which he said could produce movies qua
“It has been a lifetime dream that real-time computer graphics, and in particular games, can be as credible and realistic as a movie,” he said.
“State-of-the-art graphics and processing power will not only make games more immersive, but will also enable entirely new game concepts that can take advantage of fully dynamic environments and lighting, vastly improved physics, smarter artificial intelligence, and multiplayer experiences richer. “
The quality of the film, in this case, is not a vague descriptor of the idea that the games will look “really nice” on the new machines. It’s much more specific, particularly when we have an Epic Games executive talking about it. The movies use Epic Games’ Unreal Engine for a variety of purposes, and their role in the movie is rapidly expanding. The Mandalorian It was a great punctuation mark in this story, using Unreal to create sets in real time.
So when Epic Games says that Xbox Series X and PS5 will be able to produce movie-quality images, what it means is that they will be able to use the same high-quality assets that are used in movie production, so their games could be developed from the same blocks and rocks used to create The Mandalorian.
We saw some of this in the recent Ep5 Games demo for PS5 “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” which served as a kind of presentation moment of what next-generation images might look like one day. And while a tech demo isn’t necessarily a game from a finished game, in the past we’ve seen real games catch up with Epic tech demos over the course of a generation.
We’ve only seen glimpses of this so far. Perhaps the most impressive in terms of raw images has been Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart, which showed film-quality images in a fairly direct sense: As Digital Foundry pointed out at the time, the footage of the game we saw was probably as faithful as we saw in the movie Ratchet and Clank. However, I’m still waiting for my extended game demo of a next-generation AAA exclusive, and it’s probably going to be a little while before games start to reach such a high level.
