Unreal Engine 5 was unveiled earlier today and at Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest livestream. Its main features were shown off with a tech demo set in a desert, running on native PlayStation 5 development hardware.
You can watch the PlayStation 5 Unreal Engine 5 tech demo below:
The tech demo, titled “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” was built to show off the two new core features integral to the new engine. One is Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry, which lets artists create as much geometric detail as the eye can see while needing less time to do so. The other is Lumen, a “fully dynamic global illumination solution” that essentially takes dynamic lighting to the next level. It accounts for things like changes in level geometry and can immediately react to scene and light changes. Other things shown off include improvements to animations for more natural movement, as well as contextual animations.
Unreal Engine 5 is set to support not only next-generation hardware, but also current gen consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Developers working on Unreal Engine 4 will be able to move their projects onto the platform, as it is being built with forward compatibility in mind.
Unreal Engine 5 will be available to preview in early 2021 and will receive a full release late in 2021.
