The Unreal Engine 5 demo footage released this afternoon by Epic Games is going to be hoarding all the attention for quite some time. Not only is it a demonstration of truly impressive next-gen visuals and the first footage we've seen to be confirmed as running on Sony's PlayStation 5, but it also showcased some genuinely impressive new technologies.

Luckily, Epic didn't just drop the demo and ran off into hiding or something. Some of the key engineers, including founder Tim Sweeney, appeared in an interview with Eurogamer's Digital Foundry to discuss what was showcased in great detail.

Let's begin with the question that will be on most of our readers' minds: what was the rendering solution of the Unreal Engine 5 demo on PS5? According to Vice President of Engineering Nick Penwarden, it was 1440P 'most of the time'.

Interestingly, it does work very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well. So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit, and then we can adapt to that. In the Unreal Engine 5 demo we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time

Where does that leave the PC platform, especially after Tim Sweeney's claims of PS5's storage architecture being 'so far ahead of anything on PCs'?

Well, PC Gamer received word from Epic's Chief Technical Officer that even an RTX 2070 Super could run the Unreal Engine 5 demo at 'pretty good performance'. Technically, NVIDIA's graphics card even sports an inferior nominal TFLOPS value compared to the PS5 (9 vs 10.28), so that's great news.

Tim Sweeney expanded on that in the following statement to Digital Foundry, pointing to PC SSDs being able to deliver 'awesome' performance, too (while HDDs are probably going the way of the dodo rather quickly).

A number of different components are required to render this level of detail, right? One is the GPU performance and GPU architecture to draw an incredible amount of geometry that you're talking about - a very large number of teraflops being required for this. The other is the ability to load and stream it efficiently. One of the big efforts that's been done and is ongoing in Unreal Engine 5 now is optimising for next generation storage to make loading faster by multiples of current performance. Not just a little bit faster but a lot faster, so that you can bring in this geometry and display it, despite it not all fitting and memory, you know, taking advantage of next generation SSD architectures and everything else... Sony is pioneering here with the PlayStation 5 architecture. It's got a God-tier storage system which is pretty far ahead of PCs. On a high-end PC with an SSD and especially with NVMe, you get awesome performance too.

Posted: May 20, 2020 6:41 pm
Last Updated: Sep 01, 2020 4:57 pm
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