Brace yourself for some truly impressive levels of detail, thanks to what Epic Games calls "nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry". Just when you thought graphics terms couldn't get sillier, Unreal Engine 5 asks you to hold its beverage. But, the end result is apparently billions of triangles on screen taken from super high-res scans to offer environment and object detail that looks totally next-gen.

Of course this is a tech demo of sorts and not an actual game, but it is running in real-time on PlayStation 5 hardware. Making it one hell of a debut for the console - especially when you factor in that Sony hasn't shown or said all that much outside of a logo.


Here's more tech talk.

Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.

As per above the goal with the tech used in the above Unreal Engine 5 demo is to bridge the gap between movie CG, real life, and games - and that implementing what we see here is meant to be fairly easy. It definitely looks stunning, and again, is running in real-time on PlayStation 5 hardware with Epic Games directly in control of the Lara Croft meets Nathan Drake we see.