Playstation 5 Astonishing Graphics with Unreal Engine 5

The Console War continues and this time it is Sony who attacks. A few days ago was released the first Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo running on Playstation 5 and it is simply magnificent!

The most interesting innovations that came out of this tech demo mainly concern the  Dynamic Global Illumination and the “Truly Virtualized Geometry”.

Let’s try to better understand what they are, without getting lost in boring technicalities Cerny Style.

Dynamic Global Illumination

–Lumen–

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.

Truly Virtualized Geometry

–Nanite–

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.

To make it even simpler, the graphic quality that has characterized the cut scenes so far (introductory or intermission videos) will become in-game graphic.

Together with Nanite and Lumen, this Tech Demo also shows us:

– Fluid management improved;

–Physics improved with a new version of the Chaos Destruction System;

–Improved animations (pay attention to the movement of the hand that rests on the door, automatically, when the protagonist approaches the latter).

It’s time to see what’s next!

Now the ball is in the developers’ court. Those shown so far are the potential of the Next Gen but we want to emphasize that, probably, not all the games made for the next generation will make the most of what is shown in this tech demo.
As already said, everything will depend on the skills of the developers and the possibilities of the software houses.

What is certain is that there is a bright future for all Dreamers around the globe!

Here you can find our article on the Sony conference regarding the features of Playstaion 5 by Mark Cerny.