We’ve seen a few demonstrations of the power promised in Epic’s upcoming Unreal Engine 5. BioShock in Unreal Engine 5 looks like an entirely new game, while this port of The Simpsons: Hit And Run showcases how easy it is to import assets from previous versions of Unreal.
But to really get a sense of what Unreal 5 can do, you need something totally new. Sadly, we're probably nowhere near the first Unreal Engine 5 game entering the market, but early tech demos are showing us the full potential of Unreal 5.
The latest demo is The Market of Light, from Japanese indie developer Historia Inc. In this demo, you play as a tiny firefly searching for three glimmering gems each representing a different technology featured in Unreal 5: Nanite, Lumen, and Niagara.
You might recall Nanite from the very first Unreal 5 demo. That's the tech that gives Unreal 5 the ability to produce gazillions of polygons, while Lumen offers fully simulated dynamic light in real-time. Niagara isn't technically an Unreal Engine 5 technology as it's available for Unreal 4, but it provides a powerful suite of visual effects for game developers to play with.
The game doesn't take particularly long to finish--just 15 minutes if you're relatively brisk--but it offers a breathtaking look at a colorful world from the minuscule perspective of a bug. With 253 8K textures, 1,065 4K textures, and nearly 5 billion polygons, even a raspberry can look like its own world.
Of course, getting the most out of this demo will require a pretty hefty rig. The minimum requirement to even play The Market of Light is a GTX 1070, but that won’t give you the crazy dynamic lighting. For that, you’ll need something that’s capable of ray tracing, which means either an Nvidia RTX-series card or one of the new AMD Radeons.
The Market of Light is available now for free on Steam.