StunningVanilla has released a Next-Gen Update for The Old West: Northwood Tech Demo in Unreal Engine 5. This update ports the demo to the latest version of Epic’s engine, UE5.2, improves its graphics, and adds support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.
The Old West: Northwood Tech Demo features a lot of modern-day features, such as water ripples with character interactions, dynamic wind effects and snow trailers with VFX. Clothing, buildings and objects become wait in rain, and there are water drippings from the rooftops.
The demo also has ragdoll physics when the character falls from a height, as well as accumulation of snow and dust on clothing and buildings. Additionally, there is a feature similar to Quake 2 that allows flies, bees and butterflies to appear in specific scenarios (in Q2 it was in dead enemies and in this tech demo is during Summer time).
Now while this tech demo is not as impressive as some other UE5 demos, it at least looks great. It’s also a demo that can give you an idea of how a future game may run on your PC system. Thus, we highly recommend downloading it from here.
Speaking of UE5 tech demos, we also suggest taking a look at the following ones. At GDC 2023, Epic Games showcased a next-gen demo, called Electric Dreams. And, thankfully, you can download this demo as a UE5 environment sample project from here. Let’s also not forget the Unreal Engine 5.2 Next-Gen Tropical Rainforest Tech Demo from MAWI United. We also recommend downloading the Unreal Engine 5 Hillside Sample Demo.
All in all, these demos can give you a glimpse at UE5 until we get the first games using it. Okay okay, technically we’ve already gotten the first (which is Layers of Fear). However, we expect some more advanced ones to come out later this year. Lords of the Fallen, Immortals of Aveum and Jusant are the ones we’re currently looking forward to.
Have fun!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Good ole Johny, let em all come!
We are Pc gamers here, so we better be damn happy about this articles 👍
Allways awesome to see what we may seen in the future in games. And UE5 seems like a fantastic engine and with the latest update, stutter Will be much less common!
Demos, demos everywhere.
User Suggestion : Please make a separate section for Unreal Engine 5 articles (Its already tagged so it can filtered based on it). The initial ommph of Unreal engine 5 is not there as there is no notable games for this shutter fest galore .
I donno if its the google algorithm that favors these Unreal Articles because most of the site’s regulars are really not fond of these .
John
Thanks for the article and info on these tech demos. Let me put my 4090 to work. (After i read a few articles on getting the epic launcher and ue5 engjne tools/stuff installed :(()
It’s me, or graphics have years without improving in any way? basically the same thing that could be done 10 year ago, but in 4k. This “demos”are very far for impressing me, the next level (and final step in stealing people money) should be photo-realism, indistinguishable of real life.
It’s definitely not just you, and there are multiple reasons for this. I’ll see if I can cover a few:
1. CRYSIS. That game raised the real-time visual bar so high (and the hardware requirements with it) that the rest of the gaming industry needed an entire console generation to barely catch up to it. It completely blew expectations away and I’d say ever since its reveal people expect Crysis levels of revolutionary visuals for new generations. The console equivalent of this game that had a similar effect would be The Order: 1886. Despite it being 8 years old, it still looks so good that a mere 4K/60FPS version of it would it put it at the same level as a current gen release today.
2. Pre-baked fakery. Artists and developers got pretty good at pre-baking lighting effects, so switching over to real-time ray tracing effects visually aren’t exactly as big of an upgrade as it should be. That, plus artistic integrity goes a long way. Take Mirror’s Edge for example. That game faked global illumination incredibly well and it still looks like a very visually appeal game today.
3. Mid-gen console upgrades. Due to these machines we pretty much got visual upgrades of the same thing but at higher settings. Thanks to this, the jump between Xbox One X and Xbox Series X, or PS4 Pro and PS5 were not as pronounced. So many titles being cross-generation since the launch of the new machines certainly didn’t help either. With the exception of a few games, all these visual changes have been more gradual, which makes generational jumps less obvious.
Hardware sellers/manufacturers, will have a hard time in the next years, trying to sell useless products. We could easily stay with this generation of PCs and consoles for many years. Already touched the human limitations to see frames per second and resolutions.
Haha you underestimate the consumerist mindset of today’s normies. With enough marketing, people will line up to buy the latest shiny new toy, technical progress be damned. You can thank Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays for destroying people’s mindful purchasing habits about a century ago.
>Unreal tech demo
>it’s just a bunch of rocks again
will they ever grow self-awareness??
DLSS is like a penis pump.