Using a pristine PS5 tech demo, Epic has today unveiled Unreal Engine 5 for next-gen platforms.
With a tech demo called "Lumen in the Land of Nanite," the company debuted its new engine and two of its marquee features, the cheekily named lumens and nanite.
Lumens are a dynamic global illumination tool while nanite is a virtualized geometry which gives artists the ability to import stunning art and assets into Unreal Engine. You can watch the full reveal event below.
As the demo is running on a PS5 dev kit, the scenery may to excite players who may have felt last week's Xbox Series X gameplay reveal event proved diminishing returns are affecting the industry's graphical leaps. Though it's maybe not as powerful as when games moved from standard defintion to high definition, or 2D to 3D polygonal games, this next leap still looks to be a major one after this demo. Epic Games' Tim Sweeney even told IGN that the SSD in the PS5 is "far ahead" of current PCs.
The engine, Epic says, is intended to move game worlds from their currently static states into more dynamic states, where player actions have real-time direct effects on the world around. This is different than most worlds today which unfold in a pre-rendered style where players trigger a reaction, but it's the same reaction every time.
The Unreal Engine 5 tech demo was the latest debut to fall under the Summer Game Fest umbrella. Just yesterday, Geoff Keighley's months-long digital event premiered the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 remakes. There will be many more game reveals over the coming months, as Keighley says Summer Game Fest extends through August's online Gamescom event.
For more on the busy post-E3 gaming summer, be sure to bookmark our calendar of every summer gaming event announced so far.
