By Admin, 2021
The time has finally come! Epic Games, designers of the seminal advanced 3D videogame engine "Unreal Engine," have at least released an Early Access version of their next generation game engine. Unreal Engine 5 is slated to be the biggest paradigm shift since the first 3D games crawled from their respective swamps due to it's unique and extremely efficient way of rendering textures and lighting. The days of spending thousands of dollars on premier high performance computer hardware may be over.
The Nanite engine being introduced with Unreal Engine 5 uses virtual geometry to skin a 3D model on demand depending on view distance, as opposed to how this is currently done by making separate models with different texture levels at different distances. The practical upside of this is incredibly photorealistic live rendering at extremely high framerates without the need of yet unreleased computing hardware. Indeed, there are signs that the Unreal Engine 5 may need a fraction of current processing power to "recreate" a current generation game with equal texture resolution due to the improved way the games pipeline functions.
Shamelessly copied from the Epic Games websites, here are a few benefits for those readers equipped to understand:
Multiple orders of magnitude increase in geometry complexity, higher triangle and objects counts than has been possible before in real-time
Frame budgets are no longer constrained by polycounts, draw calls, and mesh memory usage
Now possible to directly import film-quality source arts, such as ZBrush sculpts and photogrammetry scans
Use high-poly detailing rather than baking detail into normal map textures
Level of Detail (LOD) is automatically handled and no longer requires manual setup for individual mesh's LODs
Loss of quality is rare or non-existent, especially with LOD transitions
Coupled with the Nanite engine is the Lumen lighting system. Traditional video game graphics have set lighting profiles to tell the shaders if a portion of the image to be drawn is in light or shadow, then colors accordingly for realistic lighting. Nanite takes advantage of next generation Ray Tracing technology first introduced with Nvidia graphics cards. A background or environment need not have programmed in set lighting allowing for totally realistic and variable settings for your gaming pleasure.
It remains to be seen how much of this technology will be used on the new console hardware, if any. It may be that the performance boosts from this new engine eliminate the need for lower cost gaming hardware such as consoles, as a comparatively priced desktop would allow for greater performance AND increased utility being that it is a computer over a game console. The engine is to fully release by the beginning of 2022, we at CompuTech Pinellas await with baited breath!