Epic Games Preparing Unreal Engine 5 For Debut In 2021 With Increased Photo-Realism

[Remdul]

IMO the most overlooked part of this demo is the mention of "no lightmaps" and "no LODs", which saves developers HUGE amounts of time. I've spend good years of my life modeling/UV-ing LODs, writing fast lightmapping engines, and obsessing over lightmap compression/storage schemes, UV packing etc, and all of the scripted art pipeline tools required on top of that to pull things together. Being able to scrap all of that is going to interest a lot of game developers!

The only thing I'm missing from this engine demo is how well it handles dense foliage (my other pet peeve), with alpha-testing and at the same geometric quality/density as show here.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Ah, that's not what I meant. What I meant is that the raw transmission speed of the storage module itself is only part of the question since there's extra dedicated hardware to remove all of the bottlenecks around data transmission which is not something you're going to find on PC components at the moment.

Ah, I see. But that is largely because PCs have to be built around standards (even if the standards sometimes don't seem to make sense) while Sony can pretty much do what they want with their own hardware; consoles have always been custom.