Unreal Engine 5 footage ran at 1440p 30 FPS on PS5, featured no ray tracing

Unreal Engine 5
Unreal Engine 5 (Image credit: Epic Games)

What you need to know

  • Today, Epic Games revealed Unreal Engine 5 for next-generation consoles and other devices.
  • The demo showcased stunning gameplay.
  • The resolution was "1440p most of the time."
  • The PlayStation 5 may be able to output at a higher resolution consistently even with advanced effects.

Today, we got our first look at Unreal Engine 5 running on PlayStation 5 (PS5). The demo looks like it only supported 30 frames per second (FPS), featured no ray-tracing support, and rendered at "1440p most of the time."

Eurogamer did an in-depth analysis of the footage and even interviewed Epic Games developers. Vice President of Engineering, Nick Penwarden, said the following.

Interestingly, it does work very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well. So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit, and then we can adapt to that. In the demo, we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time.

The outlet confirmed that ray tracing wasn't part of the PS5 demo. You can read the quote from the end of the piece below.

Hardware accelerated ray tracing will be supported in Unreal Engine 5, for example, but it's not a part of the PS5 tech demo revealed today.

It'll be interesting to see how the Xbox Series X handles Unreal Engine 5, but we're expecting better results than 1440p since Microsoft's console has a 2-3 teraflops advantage over the PS5. However, it's unclear if there's going to be an advantage. While the visuals are spectacular, it would've been nice to see 4K resolution and 60 FPS.

What did you think of the demo? Do you want 60 FPS to be standard? Let us know.

Asher Madan

Asher Madan handles gaming news for Windows Central. Before joining Windows Central in 2017, Asher worked for a number of different gaming outlets. He has a background in medical science and is passionate about all forms of entertainment, cooking, and antiquing.