Unreal Engine 5 hands-on: the cost of next generation rendering

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.

[darkrider]

No doubt about that. The PS5 and the series X had some problems on the last gameplay. But the results were great. It seems a big leap

[Eonjay]

Actually the Xbox and especially PS5 ran this demo quite well. All test show the same thing though and that is that most modern GPUs can run this with no problem. The issue itself is that UE5 and most specifically the Global Illumination eats CPUs for breakfest (thats why most of Alex's test here are in 720P to make sure the GPU wasn't the bottleneck). A CPU is only as fast as its slowest thread. And hardware GI is somehow more taxing on the CPU than the software implementation. When Epic figures out this better distribute the GI work on CPUs, the performance issues should be resolved across all hardware, including consoles.

[Mr Logic]

Figure what out? The BVH structure is and will be heavy on the CPU. You can see CPUs being pushed harder in any game that uses good RT.

[isarai]

I mean tech demos like this are barely optimized, they are just dumped and executed. It has me very intrigued to see what the engine can do on future titles. Especially since i didn't see any of the common issues unreal has had when it comes to open worlds.

[XBManiac]

Fortnite on a PC with a modern CPU and high end GPU can give you an idea.

[Mr Logic]

Oh... so a game without Lumen or Nanite is the best representation of UE5. Amazing.

[ZycoFox]

Next gen CPUs and GPUs are just a few months away, the RTX 4080 should be beastly for this.

Also I believe it's not fully optimized on PC yet either.