The creators of Unreal Engine have been showing off new ray-tracing technology that may give a hint of what the PS5 will be capable of.
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At the moment they might be more famous for Fortnite (and before that Gears Of War) but before they created the biggest game in the world Epic Games made most of their money from licensing out the Unreal graphics engine.
You’ll see its logo at the start of many different games, and that means Epic are always trying to keep on the cutting edge of graphics technology.
The current version is still Unreal Engine 4, but at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in the US they unveiled the Star Wars demo below that uses ray-tracing – a technique usually far too complex for consumer-priced consoles and PCs to do in real-time.
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According to Epic’s blog, the demo was put together with help from Nvidia, using their RTX technology for Volta GPUs, and Microsoft with their DirectX Ray Tracing API (DXR). In other words, it’s still not easy and they still needed powerful hardware and the help of Microsoft’s software expertise.
Epic weren’t the only ones teaming up with Microsoft and Nivdia though, and EA also showed off a tech demo called Project PICA PICA.
It’s not expected to be turned into a full game but it’s an impressive demo from EA’s secretive SEED development group, and is likely to become the basis for the tech they’ll use to make new Battlefield and Battlefront games in the future.
The most difficult thing for computer graphics to simulate though is still the human face, but Epic Games had a demo for that too.
The character below is called Siren and is based on Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang. It’s not necessarily the most convincing human character (movies have better ones, but then they’re more expensive and not interactive) but it does seem to be tech that Epic are hoping to get into games sooner rather than later.
It’s reminiscent of an updated version of the facial animation in L.A. Noire, which despite being seven years old still has some of the most convincing human characters around.
A more video-gamey example is the demo below with the same tech featuring Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis reciting a spot of Shakespeare. It looks good, but his performance is then transferred to an alien creature and it’s even more impressive.
What’s particularly exciting about the Siren tech though is that, like anything else Epic do for Unreal, it can be licensed and used by anyone. So those companies that keep letting down great games with terrible facial animation (naming no names Bethesda) can just plug in the tech and take it from there.
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Or at least that’s the theory, these are still only demos and even Siren probably won’t be in general use for a few years yet. But it’s an exciting look at the future and hopefully a good indication of what the next generation of consoles will be capable of.
But whether it’s any hint of what a possible Fortnite 2 would look like, considering the original’s cartoon art style, is hard to say…
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