Unreal Engine 5 recently emerged from early access, with a full version now available to games creators. Simultaneously, the ‘city sample’ portion from the brilliant The Matrix Awakens demo was also released, giving users a chance to get to grips with MetaHuman crowds and large-scale AI in a vast open world, with buildings, roads and more created via procedural generation. In short, Epic is opening up a staggering wealth of new technologies to all and UE5 is, effectively, the first paradigm shift in games development seen since the arrival of the new consoles. So what have we learned from this release? Put simply: it’s demanding. Very demanding.
At this point, it’s worth highlighting why the city sample is so special – and it’s pretty straightforward. Creating and rendering cityscapes of this level of detail is no walk in the park. Previous UE5 demos had been limited to linear, uniform, rocky landscapes. A city like the one ‘given away’ here is far more complex in terms of materials, shapes, forms and dynamism. The Nanite geometry system gives extreme detail to the smallest elements in the city – to the point where individual tiny assets can look almost lifelike when viewed up close. Nanite has its limitations in terms of deformable meshes like animated characters or cars, while integrating elements like foliage is still work-in-progress (though it is definitely in the pipeline!). However, the results in this demo speak for themselves.
Then here’s the global illumination system – Lumen – now updated with support for hardware triangle ray tracing for diffuse GI and reflections. In some scenarios, Lumen’s non-RT fallback systems look almost as good, but in other situations, it’s clear that RT can make a huge difference – reflections are more accurate and detail-rich, lighting is so much more accurate, especially noticeable in night-time scenes.
