Gamers rejoice! We finally have an actual, concrete glimpse at what the PlayStation 5 is capable of. Until now, we’d seen nothing official from Sony or any other third party. We had seen some leaked footage of the supposed PS5 running Spider-Man, but that was months ago. Now, we’re finally seeing some next-gen gameplay come to life.
Epic Games Is Proud Of Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo On PlayStation 5
It’s worth clarifying – this is only a tech demo. It’s not an actual game that we’re seeing gameplay footage from. However, that doesn’t matter at this point. We’ll take what we can get. This tech demo is for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, and the results are astounding.
Clearly, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is proud of what they’ve pulled off here. He spoke to The Verge about this, and what this means for video games on the next generation of consoles.
“The graphics speak for themselves. And Epic has always pushed the bleeding edge of what’s possible. Our goal isn’t just to bring more features to developers. The hardest problem in game development right now is building high quality games takes enormous time and cost. So we want to make developers’ lives easier and more productive,” he said.
Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo Shows Off Some Incredible Visuals
The tech demo focuses on a key set of features. The first one of these is something that developers have responded to with near jubilation. Epic Games is calling it “Nanite”.
Essentially, its a feature that allows developers to import their scanned images into the game as they are. Before, they had to fiddle with them, optimise them, maybe even reduce the level of polygon counts to ensure that their game ran smoothly.
Now, that’s all gone. This will likely save them a lot of development time and money.
Another feature they’re working on with Unreal Engine 5, which we see in this PlayStation 5 demo, is called “Lumen”. This is a new Global Illumination system that’s rendering light in real-time. Previously, due to hardware limitations, developers had to bake in the lighting. This meant it was static and restricted.
Players Should Be Excited About The PlayStation 5’s Capabilities
Lume takes care of all of that and instead allows for a light source to exist in real-time, which means light rays will scatter around the game environment realistically. You can already see how this could be useful during one part of the tech demo.
At a point, the ceiling of the cave system we’re seeing falls apart, creating a hole in it. Light immediately pours through it in a way that’s shockingly natural. It’s quite a sight.
Will games on the PlayStation 5 look this good from the start? It’s hard to tell. However, just the fact that the PlayStation 5 is capable of visuals that are nearly photorealistic is exciting.
