Epic Games unveils the new Unreal Engine 5

Epic Games today announced the next version of its game engine, the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), with the stunning “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” a real-time demo running live on PlayStation 5.

To show off UE5’s capabilities, Epic put together a demo running on a developer version of PS5 hardware. The results showcase incredible visual quality, combined with the detail and photo-realistic 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.”

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“Nanite frees developers from having to worry about polygon count and levels of detail. It enables you to author all the content in the game at its full, movie quality level of resolution,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told Engadget, “and then rely on the game engine to scale it down so it runs in real-time on every device.”

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters.

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Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. The demo also showcases existing engine systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering.