Epic Games presents in a big way the new version of its engine, prepared for PS5, Xbox Series X, the current generation, PC and mobile. Retail.
When we change generations we also want a generational leap in graphics. The cycle that will start from Christmas will be characterized by speed, immediacy, quality of life details that will make having a controller in your hands easier, more with the player in mind. The generation of PS5 and Xbox Series X will also be remembered for teraflops and for presumably leaving us ojipláticos on more than one occasion from what we see on screen. Unreal Engine 5 falls into that equation.
Unreal Engine 5 as the border between two generations
Because the presentation that took place this Wednesday as part of the coverage of Summer Game Fest and Geoff Keighley made one thing clear: a great change is coming. Not an immediate change, and that is important to make it clear, because the first year of life of the new generation will have a very high rate of intergenerational productions; In addition, developers need to get used to a new tool and new engines such as Epic Games' solution, UE5, which will be compatible with almost all current and future systems.
"One of our goals for the next generation is to achieve photorealism, be on par with CGI and real life," says the official statement signed by the team of technical engineers at Epic Games. All a declaration of intentions that would have remained in no man's land if it had not come accompanied by a technical demo that aroused more than a desire to see that young protagonist wandering around those ruins and deserts materialized in a real video game.
But let's get into the matter, what do we know about Unreal Engine 5? We are going to try to make it easy for you, because entering to value technicalities, figures and complex parameters would not lead us to anything at this point. We summarize in these half a dozen aspects what we know about this powerful graphics engine.
1. What we have seen: about the PlayStation 5 demo
For starters, it is necessary to talk about the technical demonstration of the presentation, called Lumen in the Land of Nanite and performed on a PlayStation 5. The video, nine minutes long, served as a showcase for an engine compatible with raytracing accelerated by himself hardware; although in this demo it was not used as such. What did run in real time is the demo, fully compatible with the Sony console. In this case, we found out that the demo was rendering at 1440p "most of the time" because it did so at dynamic resolution.
Unreal Engine 5 running on PlayStation 5
Nick Penwarden, Vice President of Engineering at Epic Games, explained it to his fellow Eurogamer: “It's interesting, but (UE5) performs very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well. So when the GPU is overloaded, we can reduce the screen resolution a bit and adapt to it, "a guarantee that there are no drops in the frame rate per second and that the GPU is not saturated. "In the demo, we actually use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at 1440p most of the time," he noted.
2. A graphics engine designed to streamline the work of developers
Here it is necessary to introduce the so-called Nanite, a system designed so that artists and designers can use the ZBrush models directly in Unreal Engine 5 without having to sacrifice quality on their models, without giving up the ambition of their sketches, accompanied by a technology of hyper realistic lighting like Lumen.
One of the goals of the Epic technical team is for the Nanite system to take care of many of those tasks that, until now, have hindered the work of artists, developers and other members of the studios. No need to simplify modeling will save time, save space, and allow for more. Richard Leadbetter, Technology Editor at Digital Foundry, explains it in an interesting article in this regard.
To give us an idea, the statue that we see in the Lumen in the Land of Nanite demo has no less than 33 million triangles with 8K textures. If we add to this that in the adjacent room there were 485 statues more identical to that, the figure gives us more than 16,000 million triangles … and they all moved with total fluidity.
Unreal Engine 5 will support real-time hardware accelerated raytracing.
On paper, it is outrageous, but the developer has been able to get rid of much of that work thanks to Nanite. Tim Sweeny, CEO of Epic, Kim Librery, CTO, and Nick Penwarden have explained these aspects in detail to the British media. "It's up to the engine to determine which pixels should be drawn to show the scene." And no, the graphics engine will not be in charge of drawing billions of polygons in each frame, but instead draws an approximation where those details that we cannot visibly perceive are eliminated. And he adds: "If you drew more polygons you would not notice it because they would only contribute infinitesimal to each pixel on the screen". A way to camouflage or deceive the human eye without breaking the magic of the scene and saving hours and hours of work along the way that, in addition, once prevented the ideas of the artistic departments from being represented in such detail.
In short: Unreal Engine 5 will render based on the triangles per pixel, strictly those that we need to see.
3. Dates: gradual arrival throughout 2021
Now when? Lumen in the Land of Nanite has also awakened craving, desire. People commented on social media that they wanted to have that or something similar in their homes as soon as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X go on sale this Christmas. Unfortunately, the first public version of Unreal Engine 5 will not arrive in 2020, but in early 2021. After that initial preview, the commercial launch of this engine will occur in late 2021 with compatibility in both the current generation of consoles (PS4 , Xbox One, Nintendo Switch) as on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and the upcoming Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. A peripheral view, if the analogy serves us, but with a vision clearly focused on the immediate future.
The transition is intended to be smooth and for this reason the compatibility between Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 will be great. This new tool has been designed to have a simple conversion in those projects and studies that seek to change or adapt their current works to this fifth member of the family.
Lumen in the Land of Nanite | Epic Games
4. What companies already work with Unreal Engine 5?
Let us start with the most obvious: Epic Games. Shortly after this first technical demo of Unreal Engine 5 was shown, Epic confirmed that its main stronghold, Fortnite, would be present on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X at its launch. Not with Unreal Engine 5, obviously, since that transition is being planned for "mid-2021"; that is, in the period between the preview and the commercial version of the engine.
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II | Ninja Theory
Regardless of the interest that Fortnite may arouse, the importance of this video game in the sector is indisputable; it is still a phenomenon in the entertainment sector capable of convincing more than 350 million people. As far as we know, the version of Fortnite with UE5 will not be a new video game, but an adaptation to the new hardware compatible – they hope – with all the platforms currently available. That is, when Fortnite uses the new engine it will not cease to be enjoyed on any of the platforms that can be played today; including account, progress, content, etc. And yes, there are plans to integrate crossplay between PS5 and Xbox Series X with the other versions.
Also Xbox Game Studios, as confirmed by the end of the presentation Phil Spencer, Xbox leader and Microsoft vice president: "Many of our studios at Xbox Game Studios are using Unreal, as the team of Ninja Theory to create Hellblade II, and they are excited to be able to bring all those innovations from UE5 to Xbox Series X. ” Thus, it is confirmed that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is being developed under this tool.
Fortnite to transition to Unreal Engine 5 "in mid-2021"
Apart from this name of the British team and without the intention of entering into speculation, there is another thing that is certain: there are many teams from Xbox Game Studios that were already using Unreal Engine. Whether or not they will use Unreal Engine 5 is something we don't know for sure; although most likely they do. In any case, they are: The Coalition (Gears 5), Compulsion Games, Double Fine (Psychonauts 2), The Initiative, InXile Entertainment, Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment, Playground Games, Rare (Wild) and Undead Labs (State of Decay).
5. Thinking of developers: royalties, percentages and benefits
On the occasion of the announcement, Epic revealed a new developer use policy. From now on, the Unreal Engine tool will continue to be free to use, but will only charge royalties to those who exceed a million dollars in income. This is actually and unfortunately a large minority, so an overwhelming majority of studios will be freed from that tax.
The current Unreal Engine 4.25 is totally free for anyone who wants to use it, but to date Epic Games has collected 5% as royalties for video games that enter at least $ 3,000 each quarter. As of now, only when the million dollars is exceeded in total income will that percentage of 5% be paid as royalties. The measure is immediately applicable and is also contemplated for Unreal Engine 5.
Lighting, drawing distance, quality of detail … Advantages of Nanite and Lumen
To give us an idea, this policy is very different from that used with another popular engine, Unity, which does not interfere through royalties or fees, but has an entry fee of $ 1,800 a year to use the license always and when the budding company has made at least $ 200,000 in the last twelve months.
To finish, Epic Games has released the Epic Online Services package completely free for the entire developer's guild, a cross-platform SDK that is already used in games like Fortnite so that they can provide services such as friend lists, lobby management, matchmaking or tools at no cost of any kind. The package is compatible with all platforms and is now available.
All in all, the conclusions that Unreal Engine 5 leaves is that a qualitative and quantitative leap awaits us for both developers and players. A link between both parties where digital entertainment will take a step forward not only graphically but also technically, administratively and economically.
Sources | Unreal Engine Official Blog; Digital Foundry via Eurogamer (Spanish version here)
