What you need to know
- Recently, Epic Games unveiled Unreal Engine 5.
- The tech demo was showcased on a PlayStation 5.
- It was unclear if the demo could run on PC.
- Recently, Epic Games' Kim Libreri confirmed it could given specific hardware requirements.
A few days ago, Epic Games revealed Unreal Engine 5 for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 (PS5). Since then, there's been some confusion about whether the photorealistic demo would work on PC, even with slightly less powerful cards than what are found in the Xbox Series X and PS5.
World Today News compiled a list of statements from Epic Games to demonstrate what would be needed to get "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" running on PC.
Let's start with the basics about what Nanite does. Epic Games said the following in a press release to describe the benefits of the new system.
Virtualized Geometry Nanite means that original cinema-quality objects containing hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine – from sculptures ZBrush to photogrammetric scans and CAD models, and it just works.
Epic Games Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Kim Libreri revealed the mission behind the technology.
If a developer uses specially created objects like statues, obtaining high-resolution geometry is one thing, but then creating a mesh that works well and looks good at different distances from the viewer is already another and quite a lot of work. We wanted to rid the developers of it. We spent several years of experiments on this before we achieved the current result.
The company further confirmed that this level of performance can be achieved on a PC. Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney added the following.
With this level of detail, a number of different components are required. One of them is a certain level of performance of the graphics accelerator and its architecture, which allows to process a huge amount of geometry. It is a large number of teraflops. The second is the ability of the system to efficiently load and transfer resources.
World Today News was able to confirm that the tech demo can run on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super GPU with a solid-state drive (SSD). Ideally, the gaming machine would have an NVMe SSD, which offers faster data transfer rates. The writer wrote the following, paraphrasing CTO Libreri.
Can the demo work on a modern PC with the GeForce RTX 2070 Super? According to Mr. Libreri, yes, and the results will be 'pretty good.' For comparison: the PS5 graphics accelerator, on which the demonstration was run, is capable of providing up to 10.28 teraflops (TFLOPS), and the GeForce RTX 2070 Super has a theoretical performance of 9 TFLOPS.
If you're interested in Unreal Engine 5 games on PC, you should invest in a powerful GPU — like something from our best graphics card roundup — and NVMe SSD later in 2021 when the engine launches and games are possibly available. An NVIDIA RTX 2080 laptop managed to run the demo at 40 frames per second.
