PlayStation 5 Reveals Spectacular New Visuals

As the gaming community eagerly awaits new leaks and rumors about the next generation consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Unreal Engine has released a video of stunning gameplay from the PlayStation 5 itself. The demo shows a young woman exploring a cave, filled with statues and falling rocks. As she walks, she will occasionally conjure a glowing blue light to help show the way, and at one point, she encounters a very detailed and ancient looking statue, covered with ornate carvings and designs that could only have been captured on film. By the end of the demo, the protagonist is forced to flee from the collapsing tomb by flying and parkouring from one fallen structure to another. This sequence of events looks absolutely gorgeous, and some of the staff in charge of this accomplishment took the time to explain just what is going on in this reveal.

This demo, which seems very similar to the constantly evolving Tomb Raider games, reveals plenty of new aspects of gaming, and the staff at Unreal Engine have detailed exactly what makes these new graphics so drastically different from previous consoles. Brian Kerris, technical director of graphics at Epic Games, said this about the new technology, Lumen: “Two key areas stood out. The first, dynamic global illumination. Beautiful bounce lighting, instantaneously…There was another area that we thought we could push forward, truly virtualized geometry. The artists wouldn’t have to be concerned over polycounts, draw calls or memory. We directly use film quality assets and bring them straight into the engine.” According to Kerris, these new graphics and game physics are achieved through editing techniques that are traditionally saved for films, producing billions of triangles per frame, which create the graphics on screen. These triangles are each differently shaped, some so small that they look like static in the pre-rendered stage that Unreal Engine shows off in their video. This editing capacity details the visual down to the pixel, which makes these new graphics more structured and authentic than ever before.

Unreal Engine has also incorporated a new audio system that focuses on reverberation, allowing the team to use amplify sounds based on real-life samples, such as the cave that the protagonist is exploring during the demo. The Chaos Physics system, another new addition that helps to improve gameplay from Unreal Engine, “accurately stimulate[s] the rigid bodies of the falling rocks and the cloth of her scarf.” Due to all of these new additions making the game environment more complex, Kerris points out that the team has had to improve their animation system, adding motion warping in order to make gameplay more lifelike, even configuring their new Lumen system to activate with handheld light sources and changing geometry of the map. “So with Nanite, you have limitless geometry, and with Lumen, you have fully dynamic lighting and global illumination, all running on a PlayStation 5.”
 

The teams at Unreal Engine and Epic Games have collaborated to create something unique and so realistic within the video game world that fans are overjoyed and filled with excitement, eager to learn what else could be revealed in the coming months. To watch the official and detailed reveal for yourself, visit here. PlayStation 5 is confirmed to be released around Christmas 2020.

Kieran Mouritsen,
Editor, NoobFeed