While yesterday’s reveal during the first Summer Game Fest showcase introduced the anticipated remaster for Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 & 2, today’s announcement takes a different approach by featuring the next generation for compute capabilities with the announcement for Unreal Engine 5.
The team over at Epic Games shares the first glimpse of the new engine with a tech demo performing on a developer kit for the approaching PlayStation 5. You can watch the footage for the demo in the video below:
Throughout the demo presented, the team Epic Games team went to showcase in-depth additions that continue to revolutionize the elements that make Unreal Engine truly unique when creating big budget projects. One aspect being the implementation of Nanite, the feature opens virtually endless object polygons as developers will not have to worry about optimizing or compressing objects being added to the project.
Gameplay performance will not be hindered by overly large object polygon counts and properly renders the project to the developer’s envision without having to adjust to a certain maintainable criteria. “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,” Epic Games tells.
The other jaw dropping addition is Lumen, alike with Nanite which does not compromise the game’s visual output, the implementation offers full dynamic global illumination with reactive response from the environment created in real-time. Light is shared to react appropriately either through natural lighting of the sun or through breaking illuminated areas in darker areas as light sill bleed in realistically rather than blatantly dropped into the scene.
Speaking with Geoff Keighley after the presentation, Epic Games tells that the demo is fully playable with no interruptive obstacles or staged elements for the demo. The team does also share that the engine is planned to be compatible with already supported platforms incuding Xbox, PC, and even mobile devices.
What do you take from the reveal from Unreal Engine 5?
Unreal Engine 5 is slated to ship sometime in 2021.
Source: Epic Games
