After revealing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 yesterday, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest has made yet another huge reveal, showcasing an Unreal Engine 5 tech demo which was captured on the PlayStation 5.
The presentation highlighted the kind of technological advancements that we will see in games of the upcoming generation, with features such as dynamic global illumination and virtualised geometry poised to add a further level of immersion and realism to the medium.
The two key technologies mentioned throughout this breathtaking tech demo are ‘Nanite’ and ‘Lumen’. Nanite is a tool that virtualises geometry, allowing for film quality art assets to be directly imported into Unreal Engine 5, which, in turn, frees developers from the worries of polygon counts and levels of detail. It also allows for truly stunning assets to be imported, with some of the assets on display utilising 8K resolution textures.
Lumen, on the other hand, deals with the aforementioned dynamic global illumination, a technology which allows a game environment to reacts to lighting changes in real time. While Nanite is insanely impressive, seeing the dynamic lighting that Lumen can offer is a game changer I can’t wait to see implemented in the years to come.
While tech demos often look far better than the games that use the tech ever do, the fact that this demo runs on PlayStation 5 quite well from what we can see, I wouldn’t be surprised if games on UE5 utilise both of these new features to some degree.
Unreal Engine 5 will be released in late 2021, with a preview slated for sometime in earlier in the year.
If you’re keen to see what the future of games may look like, check out the tech showcase below:
Dylan is an avid gamer on all systems and believes that console wars are dumb. He owns over 60 amiibo however, which is a bit of an issue. You can find him on PSN @PlushyPants49 and Twitter @GrumpyGoron
