Epic’s Unreal Engine 5: I had a first look at PS5, and now I’m a believer

I’ve heard the idea before: live movie. A game that feels cinematic. This has been the promise of every PlayStation since the turn of the century.

Watching Epic Games’ first look at Unreal Engine 5 at Playstation 5However, it ended up making me more of a believer than I thought it would be.

The video, which runs on PlayStation 5 hardware according to Epic, is largely a sample of how much detail Unreal Engine 5 can present and how it can be illuminated. The entire video of more than 8 minutes looks like a preview scene or part of a lush animated movie.

The style, somewhere between Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed, shows a woman exploring a cave. Find endless elaborate statues and finally fly through a ruined city stretching to the horizon. The key features of Unreal Engine 5 are the ability to incorporate digital assets at the film level and represent them through a technology called Nanite, which allows a ton of polygons to be presented at once, and a complete lighting system called Lumen that It promises to dynamically illuminate every detail scene of those polygons on the fly. The 4K version of the Epic Games video is below.

In one part of the video, in a room full of insanely ornate statues, Epic says that each model of statue has 33 million triangles drawn on it, and that the room has more than 16 billion triangles. Unreal Engine 5 on the PS5 will create about 20 million triangles per frame, which will end in “pixel-sized triangles,” says Epic.

The engine’s spatial audio capabilities also promise room geometry calculations to also create dynamic sound. Everything seems surprising, but although the PS5 should be released later this year, Unreal Engine 5 won’t arrive until 2021. The preview will be in early 2021, and the full version will arrive at the end of next year. This video is just a long-term extended early look.

How good could PS5 or Xbox One Series X be?

The sense of detail and scale … well, you can watch the demo video for yourself. However, state-of-the-art consoles have made great promises in the past, and the demos don’t clearly indicate what the actual games will do. Unreal Engine 5 won’t even come until 2021, which also means next-gen consoles, including PlayStation 5 and Xbox One Series X It will continue to wait for some of its most exciting tools when they launch, probably in late 2020.

Epic promises that Unreal Engine 5 will have similar capabilities on both the PS5 and the upcoming Xbox, but the demo video runs on a PS5, which immediately makes me wonder if Epic thinks the PS5 is the best hardware. Epic’s Tim Sweeney won’t make any direct performance comparisons, but during a conversation at Zoom he says Unreal Engine 5 takes advantage of next-gen SSD storage speeds. “[Unreal Engine] Five is now being optimized for next-generation storage to accelerate charging at multiple current yields. Not just a little bit faster, but a lot faster, so you can incorporate this geometry and display it even though not everything fits in memory, taking advantage of next-generation SSD architectures and everything in between. Sony is a pioneer in that with the PlayStation 5 architecture. It has a top-level storage system, which is way ahead of PCs. “

It will shrink, and Fortnite will get it in 2021

While PlayStation 5 and Xbox One Series X are clearly the primary beneficiaries of Unreal Engine 5’s new powers, the engine will run on (obviously) PC, older consoles, Android, and iOS. Fortnite will make the switch to UE5 in 2021. “Gen five works on all platforms” Confirms Sweeney from Epic. “It has to, because when Fortnite switches to Unreal Engine 5 at the end of next year, it will continue to support all 9 platforms.”

On other platforms, it seems Unreal Engine 5 will simply shrink, though it’s unclear to what extent it will shrink on each platform. “To maintain backward compatibility with previous generation platforms, we have this next-generation content channel where you can build your assets or import them at the highest quality level, the film quality level, which will run directly next time generation consoles, “says Sweeney. “And the engine will provide more scalability paths to reduce the resolution of your content to run on everything, down to several years ago iOS and Android devices … you can build the same game for all these systems, but just get a level different from graphic fidelity. “

That same downscaling will also apply to mobile virtual reality, which uses phone-level chipsets. “What it means for mobile virtual reality running on a mobile chipset will be the same answer … as making Nanite content work on a phone,” Epic CTO Kim Libreri confirmed in a Zoom chat.

Ultra real VR, immersive attractions

All this power, and specifically the ways in which film assets can be represented in real time, leads me to think not necessarily about games, but about virtual reality.

Epic’s Tim Sweeney agrees. “Certainly, all the technology we are demonstrating will be able to run on high-end PC-based virtual reality systems, which means a new generation of graphics fidelity, particularly in geometry. I have nothing specific to announce for the virtual reality here, but I think it’s going to create a really interesting march towards photorealism … and as you see devices improve their resolution and other system parameters, it will be very interesting.

Of course, Sony’s PlayStation 5 will be compatible with virtual reality, and it is very likely that it will get new PSVR hardware in the future.

Epic’s Libreri targets corporate virtual reality in particular as a big target, where additional capabilities could be even more important. That would also extend to creative studios and could be used in film production. “This geometry resolution is very important to our business customers, whether they are designing a car or an airplane, or making a movie. Virtual reality is a very important part of the business space … almost everyone who uses Unreal Engine in the design space, he uses virtual reality to evaluate his spaces and collaborate together. “

Is this the cinema and games crossover?

It seems like what Epic shows the most in the video is that crazy attraction distance, and the way so many polygons can appear at once and light up on the go. Epic’s most exciting promise is that cinematic assets can appear and be used in games. It seems like the frequently promised goal of games that meet movies in a strange interactive mix.

“Absolutely,” says Libreri, noting that this is how productions like Disney’s The Mandalorian already work. “The way these new virtual LED productions work is that they create an art department more or less like a game art department, and build content before main photography … I always use the car chase analogy: what about driving the cars? around the terrain like you would in a video game and then filming that? and then you can put movie cameras around things. “

“I think over the next year, you will see some amazing TV shows and movies that start to feel a little bit more like the things we do when we play games all the time.”

My mind jumped to immersive theme park rides in the future, specifically Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge and its simulator video game Falcon.

“I guarantee that our friends at Lucasfilm wish they had this technology when they were building the Millennium Falcon ride,” says Libreri.