Unreal Engine 5: lots of Tflops needed and features also on Xbox Series X

[Bread Pitt]

The graphic slap of the day was granted to the technical demo Unreal Engine 5 . We see a woman, extremely well reproduced environments and light effects, all in real time on PS5. We suspected as much, but Epic Games confirms that the features presented today that allow this demo to exist will obviously be available on Xbox Series X.

Detailed geometry and realistic light on Xbox Series X-Unreal Engine 5

Two main names were mentioned: Lumen for the light part, and Nanite for geometry. "The key features we discuss will work on all next generation console platforms," said Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games. In other words, it is obvious that the Xbox Series X will benefit from all this, especially since many Xbox studios today use the Unreal Engine 4.

We don't have performance comparisons, we can't share performance comparisons, but it's a set of features you can count on with this generation, especially the micro polygon geometry with Nanite technology as well as real-time global illumination with Lumen.

This type of graphic rendering with such a level of detail and such realistic light will therefore arrive well on Xbox Series X provided that the developers use the engine as it should. Epic also confirms that it takes a large number of Teraflops to run everything and that's good since the Xbox Series X has a power of 12 Teraflops.

The Unreal Engine 5 will be available from the start of 2021 and Fortnite will undergo an update to this engine the same year.

Unreal Engine 5​

Additional technical information of demo Unreal Engine 5

Digital Foundry, again, have published a large article which adds some interesting details on the technical demo we attended.

• The large statue which the camera approaches makes 33 million triangles with 8K textures
• The following scene shows 485 identical statues in the same room with the same quality, for a total of 16 billion triangles in total
• Epic indicates that the 10 billion polygons are not created for each image because some are even smaller than a pixel. This is an approximate rendering the purpose of which is that no detail perceived by the player is missing
• Epic confirms that a number of components are required to achieve this level of detail. Starting with a powerful GPU and good architecture
• "A lot of Teraflops are needed for this," says Epic, adding that it also requires a very good ability to load these elements at very high speed to obtain such a rendering, which the SSD of the new consoles allows.
• Digital Foundry confirms that the micro-polygons engine will consume a lot of GPUs. If necessary, the resolution can be lowered to relieve the GPU.
• The demo runs in dynamic resolution but in 1440p most of the time, and without ray tracing although it is supported by the Unreal Engine 5
• The demo uses a large majority of assets from the Quixel Megascans library, which is a huge database (surfaces, vegetation ...) in high definition