Epic Games revealed a demo video for us to show how games running on PS5 could look like during today’s Summer Game Fest Livestream with an Unreal Engine demo using the power of Sony’s next-gen console.
Called “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” the demo isn’t part of any game that’s designed for release according to the Washington Post, but Epic Games did say that it’s completely playable. The tech demo itself was recorded running on an actual PS5 via HDMI.
It’s meant to show off the company’s next engine development for games, Unreal Engine 5, and specifically two new aspects of it: Lumen and Nanite. The first relates to the development tool’s new dynamic lighting system while the other one is meant to create better detail and in-depth details in games.
Here’s the full tech demo:
Our next look at next-gen gameplay came last week when Microsoft showed amazing upcoming game trailers for a number of games running on Xbox Series X. Those were actual playable games and not just tech demos, but also very edited trailers that didn’t give a ton of information into how next-gen games might really look or play differently.
During a post-demo interview with Geoff Keighley, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney didn’t answer the question about the comparison of the PS5’s capabilities to Xbox Series X. Instead, the opinionated head of Epic Games is specifically promoting the power of PS5’s new exclusive SSD technology.
“The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now,” Sweeney told The Verge. “It’s going to help drive future PCs. [The PC market is] going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.’” At the same time, he paused short of saying how that would stack up to the SSD speeds being guaranteed by Microsoft.
Xbox Series X and PS5 both will be released later this year. Epic Games told the Post that Unreal Engine 5 won’t be widely available until 2021, with Fortnite getting ported to the new engine after it released on next-gen consoles in Unreal Engine 4.
