Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney, has said that the PlayStation 5’s recent Unreal Engine 5 demo was the result of “years of discussions” between Sony and Epic on the future of graphics and storage architectures. Over on Twitter, Sweeney promised the Nanite and Lumen tech will not only be fully supported but will also be “awesome” on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X.
In a subsequent tweet, he clarified that this applies to high-end PCs as well. However, Unreal Engine 5 will also offer cross-gen support as it comes with features that can allow developers to scale content down for current-gen platforms using “traditional rendering and lighting techniques.” Sweeney later joked that Commodore 64 won’t be supported.
When a user asked why Epic opted for the PS5 instead of PC, Sweeney said that it came down to “systems integration and whole-system performance.” “Bringing in data from high-bandwidth storage into video memory in its native format with hardware decompression is very efficient,” he added.
In a separate interview with MCV UK, Sweeney explained what Nanite and Lumen tech are capable of. He said:
Our goal isn’t just to bring more features to developers, but to help solve the hardest problem in game development right now, which is that building high-quality content takes enormous time and cost. So you want to make it highly productive for people to build games of this quality level. This sort of super dense geometry system that we’ve built really means that all the industries that use our engine can basically not have to worry about additional authoring process, you can load in a movie quality asset, and the engine does all the work behind the scenes.
Check out our previous coverage to learn more about Sweeney’s thoughts on the PS5.
