Unreal Engine 5 treats our eyes once again with a truly mind-blowing demo, highlighting some brand new stunning technology, running on PS5.
The opening ceremony of Unreal Fest Seattle 2024 took place yesterday. The opportunity for Epic to show us its work on the already impressive Unreal Engine 5, and more specifically what awaits us in version 5.5. After Nanite and Lumen, the engine will welcome a new technology that will literally put a light in our eyes. The illustrative demo ran on PS5 during the conference. Let’s shed some light on this.
Great highlight of Unreal Engine 5’s advancements
Since its launch in 2022, Unreal Engine 5 has continued to impress with its capabilities to amaze us (and this despite the significant stuttering problems already known in previous versions). The Nanite (for triangles) and Lumen (for global illumination) technologies were very promising when they were first presented on PS5. Two years later, history repeats itself with the demonstration of a new experimental technology called MegaLights, also presented on PS5.
This new Unreal Engine 5 feature focuses on direct lighting and shadows. MegaLights makes it possible to display these more realistically on paper in real time. To illustrate its points, Epic relied on its first technical demo of the engine on PS5. This time, however, the character Echo moves through a colorful market lit by both candles and light bulbs or giant advertising screens.
There are over 1,000 lights that create their own shadows that blend together in an absolutely stunning way. However, this Unreal Engine 5 technical demo should not be taken at face value. A full-fledged game won’t necessarily be able to take full advantage of this experimental MegaLights technology, or at a frame rate that’s less than ideal. We will certainly have to wait a little longer to see results similar to those in the following video in completely smooth execution and with more robust machines in terms of hardware in play. But such a perspective definitely makes one dream about the future in terms of graphic and visual technologies.
Source: Unreal Engine on YouTube
