Future Games has shared a new video for Unreal Engine 5 at its Summer Showcase 2023 event, showing off some truly next-gen graphics.
For this video, Future Games used clips from environments that various artists have created in Unreal Engine 5. For instance, you can find a The Witcher-inspired environment, as well as a Call of Cthulhu map. There is also a cinematic version of The Matrix Demo. And yes, Epic has also included the mind-blowing Etchu Daimon Station.
Now I’ll be honest here. I don’t expect current-gen games to achieve this kind of graphics. A small portion of late current-gen games may come close to some of these demos. Maybe. Hopefully. However, these feel like graphics that can be achieved by PS6 and the next Xbox console.
I’d love to be proven wrong. But just go ahead and take a look at the video. Hell, even with its compression issues, you can easily see how much better these environments look than what we’ve gotten these past three years. Even A Plague Tale: Requiem, a game that looks absolutely amazing, cannot match some of these environments. Hell, we haven’t even gotten these graphics that were possible in Unreal Engine 4. And remember that Unreal Engine 4 tech video that had next-gen weather/physics effects? Yeah, there is no game in existence close to this.
Anyway, go ahead and enjoy the video!
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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0/10. Not enough stuttering
Not to worry, there will be plenty of that
John watching the UE5 showcase https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/574365daba7963a1bac54a96c80252cff710633462fad1892b3c0e557b5970d0.jpg
The train station is still by far the best UE5 tech demo. What makes it even more impressive is that according to the creator’s blog post about the demo, he created practically all assets from scratch (the few he didn’t were used from Quixel’s asset libraries). Soon after he got a job at nvidia. If only he released it to the general public to test it out.
Sadly I don’t think we’re going to see games using UE5 this well anytime soon. Like John said, it probably won’t be until the next generation we’ll get visuals like this.
So basically late 2027 ….
People kinda said that about early UE4 demos and while those levels of visuals are more easily achieved on PS5/XSX UE4 ports, a lot of late gen UE4 games on PS4/X1 look great also.
Plus stuttering
Not all UE4 titles stutter tho.
Its a common trend for games that push fidelity or are open world
Unreal Engine game symptoms include:
-stuttering and general poor performance
-long game credits that reveal outsourcing to India
-sterile and clinical environment due to lack of control over engine
-developer blaming stuttering on user’s systems
-developer inferiority complex as a result of the inability to make a custom engine
-attracts the Unreal mod community that inexplicably manages to make the original look worse
-John featuring the game for no other reason than the game using Unreal Engine
How many custom game engines have you made?
Dark Side of Unreal
looks beautiful. I understand the hate because of the stutter and performance issues..
But if we park that for a second and just look at the artdesign the graphics itself of this engine. Im very enthousiastic how pretty it looks. I come from an age where we had just 2D graphics in 16 different colours. So seeing these life like and photorealistic screens is a amazing evolution
I built a 386 system in 1988 and it had the then new SVGA which was the first to give you 256 colors at 640 x 480. In the 256 color mode it ate up 256K out of the whooping 640K of system RAM and a 80 MB hard drive …. The system including the monitor cost me $2000 to build myself which is over $5000 today …. Cripes there were only a couple of games that even supported 256 colors and those want to see 320 x 240 and you had to perform some serious voodoo to get them to do 256 colors at 640 x 480. But the point of 256 color back then wasn’t for games it was so you could display pictures that would look fairly decent after dithering. Shortly after I built it I started working as a components tester (Testing components like motherboards, memory boards, video cards, modems, etc. for IBM compatibility) for Gateway when they were still on a farm in western Iowa and that gave me access to Windows 2.0 but it only supported 16 colors.
Why don’t these tech demos include stutters for the real life experience?
Unreal Stutter 5
The reason these demos never make it into games is they are already using 100% of the resources available (GPU, CPU, memory) Then you start adding in all the AI and other systems that make up a game then you have to find a way to grab resources back to make it all work
Take for instance AC Unity and the vast number of NPCs it had in it. Then each successive AC game afterwards you saw fewer and fewer. Why is that? It’s simple consoles have a limited CPU, GPU and memory budgets and when you add something new it means you have to take something old out so everything still fits into the limited budget you have available and one of the easiest places to claw back budget and gain more CPU, GPU and memory is from culling the number of NPCs you have.
Another good example is Cyberpunk 2077 …. In order to claw back enough to make it work on a PS4 or Xbox One they had to turn Night City into a frigging ghost town with hardly any people or vehicles and it still plays like crap.