I don’t know if you’ll remember that in 2021 we first saw the Unreal Engine 5 in action on an Xbox. How could it be otherwise, those tasked with bringing this to life were the guys from The Coalition, the creators of Gears of War. The study turned out today the one who gets the most out of this engine throughout the industry, and watching Ninja Theory makes it difficult for him.
What we could see in 2021 was “The Cavern” demo where a character designed for this presentation left us speechless. It must be said that The Cave was executed in real time on an Xbox Series, and it was something that everyone could see. The person responsible for showing it was Colin Penty, who rehearsed today at the Siggraph’s blog.
Today it would be possible to run The Cavern in real time at 60 fps
Penty was interviewed for the event blog and left us with some cool quotes; however, the Xbox in particular caught my attention. That American consoles are a basic platform for them That shouldn’t be surprising either, but it’s surprising that Epic Games’ engine works so well with almost no effort.
The creative also commented that Unreal Engine 5 will “continue to improve visually, eventually reaching movie quality”
The Coalition uses UE5 for our future projects, so we knew we had to catch up with the technology, the best way to do that is almost always to roll up your sleeves and build something. We use Xbox as one of our main platforms in The Coalition, so getting UE5 up and running quickly on Xbox to help ourselves and Epic Games identify any potential Xbox issues with the engine was a priority. We also wanted to see how the engine would perform on Xbox, what visual features we could afford to run, and at what quality on Xbox hardware.
The demo then ran at 0 fps, due to geometry and timing issues; but Penty thinks that with the upgrades that have been added to the engine, 60 fps would be achievable.
In the end, we had to run the demo on Unreal Engine at 30fps on Xbox Series X. Whereas today it would probably be much easier with new Unreal builds and our own local optimizations and our knowledge of the engine, when we demoed For “The Cavern”, we didn’t have all of these optimizations and knowledge, as it was one of the first times we ran a cutscene on console with UE5. I had to turn down the Lumen lighting quality and disable some larger shadow casters, among other things, to get the demo to run at 30fps at the time.
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