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Epic bets on Unreal Engine 5 transforming next-gen game development - here's what developers think
We recently got our first glimpse of what video games could look like on PS5 thanks to a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.
www.vg247.com
Long article, lot to sift through
Epic Games VP of engineering Nick Penwarden explains:
Epic Games says much of this is possible due to the unique architecture of the PS5, which is why the engine was shown off running on Sony’s machine.
“The PlayStation 5 provides a huge leap in both computing and graphics performance, but its storage architecture is also truly special,” Penwarden says. “The ability to stream in content at extreme speeds enables developers to create denser and more detailed environments, changing how we think about streaming content. It’s so impactful that we’ve rewritten our core I/O subsystems for Unreal Engine with the PlayStation 5 in mind.”
The big question is whether this new level of detail will be viable over the course of a 30-40 hour game. A traditional asset creation pipeline results in reduced file sizes thanks to robust optimisation, but we could see games balloon if those steps are skipped.
“Those megascans assets are huge, and if we were only to use the non crunched down versions, I can’t even fathom how much hard drive space that would take up,” Abdullah tells me. “Though hopefully there is a solution to that too which we will see in time.”
“Are 30 hour games of that visual fidelity really possible?” Graff asks. “To that I would say no, at least not really. The main bottleneck and problem I see at the moment is memory. Storing all these ultra-high-poly models is likely not possible in a game that shouldn’t take up hundreds of GB of space. But of course all the techniques mentioned are still valid and developers are often able to perfect them to a degree where it’s impossible to see the difference between low and high poly model. So I’d say they’ll still play a role in next-generation game development, just not as important as they do now, and games that look like the tech demo could very well be possible, just not without all the little tricks and cheats game developers always come up with.”
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