Epic Games released its new game engine called Unreal Engine 5, and the demo was presented on Sony’s upcoming PS5. The company says that it was just a small teaser of what the developers have planned for the next-gen games and it is working closely with Sony and Microsoft to make sure all the creative tools are utilized.

“The graphics speak for themselves. And Epic has always pushed the bleeding edge of what’s possible,” CEO Tim Sweeney tells The Verge. “Our goal isn’t just to bring more features to developers. The hardest problem in game development right now is building high-quality games takes enormous time and cost. So we want to make developers’ lives easier and more productive.”


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The result displayed on the PS5 indicated incredible visual quality and photorealistic lighting. According to Kim Libreri, Epic’s chief technology officer, “the next-gen consoles are going to give consumers a quantum leap, and UE5 is another leap on top of that.”

Epic is planning to work with game developers so that the final products are available for not only game consoles but also smartphones and PCs. “Each generation introduces a new set of problems you don’t have to worry about. We’re trying to remove the content scalability content problem from this generation,” says Sweeney.

“You can build a high-end console game and it can look fantastic and you can also make it work on smartphones, and you can build an audience far bigger than just the hardcore gaming audience by shipping it on more platforms,” he added, referencing Fortnite. “The technology can enable that and make it more productive.”

Source: Epic Games

Developers who are looking to make games with the most up-to-date technology will be able to use UE5’s big advancements in graphic details like objects and lighting. Sweeney says that it took years of partnership with Sony to fully exploit the console’s unique architecture and he is quite hopeful about the brilliance of the nextgen games.

Source: Epic Games

“Sony has really done an awesome job of architecting a great system,” Sweeney says. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. They’re going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.’” He further said that when the UE5 will be combined with Sony’s PS5, the users will find “nothing but seamless, continuous worlds, and you can have this degree of fidelity going on for as many kilometers and gigabytes as you wish.”

With UE5, Epic is introducing new technologies like Nanite and Lumen. Nanite is a tool that will be able to visualize geometry, regenerating “as much geometric detail as the eye can see.”

Source: Epic Games

That way, “film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine — anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data — and it just works,” the company explains.

Lumen, on the other hand, is a new dynamic global illumination tool that is going to work in real-time for game development. This will ensure high-quality animation and film production. “Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly,” the company explains.

UE5 will be available for the users next year and Sweeney says that Epic might add more features in it by then.