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Today, Epic Games revealed its next-gen game engine, Unreal Engine 5. To showcase the power of its new engine, Epic revealed a brand new, fully playable tech demo that’s running on the PlayStation 5 in real-time.

IGN asked what advancements are in the PS5 that allows for Unreal Engine 5 to function at this high of a level on the console. Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney explained that it was the system storage advancements Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny revealed earlier this year that makes the next-gen Sony console a powerhouse.

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“I think, first of all, Sony has a massive, massive increase in graphics performance compared to previous generations. But you know, I guess we get that every generation?” Sweeney joked. “But Sony’s made another breakthrough that in many ways is more fundamental, which is a multi-order magnitude increase in storage bandwidth and reduction in storage latency.”

As revealed back in March – in a digital deep dive on the PS5 hosted by Sony architect Mark Cerny – Sony revealed its custom solid-state drive that targets at least 5GB per second in terms of bandwidth. That’s compared to the 50-100 MB/s capable on the current PS4 hard drives.

“[The PS5] puts a vast amount of flash memory very, very close to the processor,” says Sweeney. “So much that it really fundamentally changes the trade-offs that games can make and stream in. And that’s absolutely critical to this kind of demo,” Sweeney explained.

“This is not just a whole lot of polygons and memory. It’s also a lot of polygons being loaded every frame as you walk around through the environment and this sort of detail you don’t see in the world would absolutely not be possible at any scale without these breakthroughs that Sony’s made.”

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Sweeney says that Sony’s storage architecture is far ahead of “the best SSD solution you can buy on PC today. And so it’s really exciting to be seeing the console market push forward the high-end PC market in this way.”

While Epic wouldn’t comment on any potential performance differences between the PS5 and Xbox Series X, Sweeney confirmed that the features shown today, like real-time global illumination and virtualized geometry, are “going to work on all the next-generation consoles.”

For more, check out IGN’s comparison of the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.

Epic Games unveiled the Unreal Engine 5 today and showcased it with a real-time PlayStation 5 tech demo called Lumen in the Land of Nanite. While the tech demo is not a real game in development, it is fully playable, Epic confirmed.

IGN asked Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney if the Lumen demo, which is running in real-time on a PlayStation 5 development kit, was real. Libreri said that it is not a real game, but Sweeney interjected with a surprising twist.

“It is playing 100% in real-time on the [PlayStation 5] and you do have full control over the character,” Sweeney says after Libreri said the demo was not a real game. It turns out that just means the demo is not a real game in development with plans for release. The demo itself does function.

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“It’s totally playable,” Libreri confirmed. “In fact, if GDC happened we would have let people play through the thing.”

So there you have it, while Epic did not create a whole new game for the PlayStation 5, they did build a working, playable demo running off a PlayStation 5 dev kit. Earlier in the interview, Libreri even told IGN, “I think a lot of people [will ask], ‘Oh is [the demo] real?’ But you know that demo was grabbed from the back of a PlayStation 5 development kit. An HDMI cable went into a disc recorder and played out real-time — no editing, no tricks, that’s what comes off the box.”

So while you won’t be able to play Lumens in the Land of Nanite when the PS5 is released, you have a handle of what games look like as they run and play on the next-gen PS5 console.

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Tim Sweeney isn’t just interested in the visual fidelity the engine offers either, pointing to how Unreal Engine 5 – in conjunction with next-gen hardware – should allow for brand new kinds of games to emerge. Pointing to how Battle Royale games could only have emerged with current-gen processing and networking power, he explains how this could lead to another step into the unknown:

“The technologies that we’re showing today [are] going to enable entirely new types of games that we can’t even envision yet. And that’s the exciting part. We can’t even imagine yet what this is going to enable the industry to do.”

Check out IGN’s full coverage of the Unreal Engine 5 reveal and Tim Sweeney’s comments on the breakthroughs of the PS5.

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.

Today, Epic Games revealed the first look at Unreal Engine 5, its next-generation game engine designed with features meant to make game worlds more detailed and dynamic. To show off the power of its new game engine, Epic released a real-time tech demo called, “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” which runs live on the PlayStation 5.

Lumen in the Land of Nanite is a fully playable title made up of Unreal Engine 5’s two new tools: Lumens, a dynamic global illumination tool, and Nanite, a virtualized geometry that lets artists import film-quality art and assets into Unreal Engine.

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The demo shows a woman venturing into a rocky cavern and discovering a hidden temple. The demo makes a particular point to highlight how light and objects react dynamically, and the demo ends with a thrilling flight through a crumbling canyon. All of the assets and visuals in the demo are reacting in real-time, meaning the PlayStation 5 is processing the demo as it happens.

“I think a lot of people [will ask], ‘Oh is [the demo] real?’ But you know that demo was grabbed from the back of a PlayStation 5 development kit,” says Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri in an interview with IGN. “An HDMI cable went into a disc recorder and played out real-time — no editing, no tricks, that’s what comes off the box.” Incidentally, Sweeney made clear that the SSD in that devkit is “far ahead” of current high-end PCs.

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Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney explained Unreal Engine 5 is meant “to do things that are absolutely not possible today.” This means offering new levels of photorealism and visuality but also offer these tools in a way that increases the productivity and efficiency of game developers. “Lumen [and Nanite]… are not just order-of-magnitude leaps in visual quality but they’re also greatly simplifying technologies for the artists who build content,” says Sweeney.

The goal, according to Kim Libreri, is to make game worlds as immersive and realistic as modern movies, but where that goal differs from previous game generations is how interactive that realism is.

While games this generation and older are detailed and realistic, they’re also static. The Lumens and Nanite demo showcase multiple instances where changes in the environment happen in real-time, and Unreal Engine 5 is capable of rendering these changes immediately. When rocks crumble, it’s not a pre-rendered cutscene but a high-resolution rock asset moving in real-time based on the player’s actions. When a light source changes, it’s not multiple tricks to simulate a flashing light, but real-time processing power at work.

“If you notice, most video games today are pretty static environments. You know, things don’t change, there’s not a lot of cause and effect. You’re lucky if you can change the state of a game and come back and it’s actually changed. [Unreal Engine 5] allows everything to be dynamic.”

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%E2%80%9CAn%20HDMI%20cable%20went%20into%20a%20disc%20recorder%20and%20played%20out%20real-time%20%E2%80%94%20no%20editing%2C%20no%20tricks%2C%20that%E2%80%99s%20what%20comes%20off%20the%20box.%E2%80%9D”]Epic is quick to point out the quality of the assets used for the demo, which they say are film-quality assets as opposed to the ones typically used for video games. While movie-level visuals are often higher-quality, video game assets are lower-resolution and are buoyed by development tricks to make them seem more realistic.

“The interesting thing is a lot of times artists are having to make those super high-poly models anyways, they just have to take an extra step and build the low-poly model, put a lot of time and care into that and then bake all the high-quality details into a normal map,” says Epic Games VP of engineering Nick Penwarden. “ Now they don’t have to do the extra work of building that optimized low-poly asset and they get higher quality visuals.”

What’s more, Epic says that the level of quality seen in the demo is going to be easier to replicate, especially from smaller developers who previously didn’t have the scale or time to render games at this level. Assets at this kind of level and quality will be available on the Unreal store for other developers to easily use.

“It’s really easy. You go to the Quixel asset store, download the rocks and the mountains, and the assets you want, and you just place them in there,” says Libreri. “It’s actually massively lowering the barrier of entry of how complex it is to make a game level.”

Epic Games also announced that it’s waiving royalties on the first $1 million in game revenue starting today, meaning developers using Unreal Engine will keep more of their profits. Epic Online Services is also available to make cross-platform play easier.

Fortnite will be released on next-gen consoles at launch and will be migrated to Unreal Engine 5 in mid-2021. Sweeney says Fortnite will likely be the first game running on Unreal Engine 5, but there are plenty of next-gen games currently in development using Unreal Engine 4 and even some first-party games will use Unreal Engine, though Sweeney did not specify whether it’s Unreal Engine 4 or 5.

Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview early 2021, with a full release scheduled for later that year, and will support current- and next-gen consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have added another launch title. Epic Games has confirmed that its free-to-play battle royale game Fortnite will release at launch for both next-generation consoles.

Epic did not provide any details on how Fortnite will benefit from the increased horsepower of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. However, the company did announce that it will migrate Fortnite on PS5 and Xbox Series X to the Unreal Engine 5 in the middle of 2021. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said this move will open up new possibilities for the game:

“It puts a vast amount of additional new power in the hands of all the creators who build Fortnite, both within Epic and the hundred million or so outside of Epic,” Sweeney said during a Summer Game Fest stream. “It’s going to be very interesting to see where this enables the game to go in the future. I think what we have now is a very, very small fraction of what the game will be in the future.”

In a blog post, Epic confirmed that Fortnite will support cross-progression with the next-gen systems, so your account, items, and progress will carry over to PS5 and Xbox Series X. The company also reiterated that Fortnite will continue to support cross-play between all platforms, including the next-gen consoles.

Unreal Engine 5, which was just announced, promises to deliver graphics that are on with current Hollywood CGI standards. Part of Fortnite’s charm is its stylized nature, so it’s unlikely Epic will use the new engine to change the graphics style, but it’ll be intriguing to see how the game makes use of the new technology.

Fortnite joins a growing list of launch titles confirmed for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, following Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and others before it. For more on all the games coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, check out GameSpot’s roundups below.