It's safe to say that we were all blown away by the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo that was broadcast last May. Epic's new engine uses brand new technologies called Nanite and Lumen to render photorealistic images with billions of polygons and lighting that fully mimics actual, real-life light. It was an incredible display that should excite anyone for next-generation games.

What's even more impressive is how good it looked despite being streamed. Imagine how good it would have looked if it had streamed in ultra-high definition.

But the craziest thing about that demo might not have been anything that we actually saw, but what went on behind the scenes. According to Epic's VP of Engineering, that Unreal 5 demo wasn't even more graphically intensive than Fortnite.

“I can say that the GPU time spent rendering geometry in our UE5 demo is similar to the geometry rendering budget for Fortnite running at 60fps on consoles," Nick Penwarden told PCGamesN in a recent interview.

What this means is that not only is Unreal 5 incredibly beautiful, it’s also incredibly efficient. Fortnite is a fine game, but it’s not exactly a graphical powerhouse. Fortnite’s textures are all pretty basic, and while it’s stylized cartoonish characters certainly look good, they’re hardly impressive by today’s standards.

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The tradeoff is that Fortnite will play perfectly fine even on hardware that is several generations old. But for Unreal Engine 5 to display something that beautiful using the same hardware load as Fortnite means that Unreal 5 is incredibly efficient with its use of resources, and it makes one wonder what it could do with the sort of next-gen hardware featured in the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X.

Part of that efficiency comes from the way Unreal 5’s Nanite technology renders its polygons. While it can render billions of polygons at once, it only renders as many polygons as it needs to depending on where the camera is located. Nanite automatically handles the level of detail (LOD) calculations on the fly so that the developer doesn’t need to worry about draw distances or field of view.

Unreal 5 has huge potential to make new games the best-looking we’ve ever seen. We can’t wait for the first batch of next-gen games to arrive on next-gen hardware to see what the two combined are really capable of.

Source: PCGamesN

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