Summer Game Fest's Special Wednesday Showcase: Unreal Engine 5 announced
Summer Game Fest's special event is set to go live later today, giving us reveals and news for upcoming games due out in the future. As previously announced, Summer Game Fest will be an event that spans multiple months, from May all the way to August. According to the presenter, Geoff Keighley, it'll be "one of the more important moments this summer", for gaming. Whether or not that'll be true, well, you'll have to see for yourself when the livestream kicks off today at 8am PT/10am CT. Keep an eye on this thread, because we'll be covering every major announcement made.
Live Coverage
The first thing we see is the Epic Games logo. They're introducing virtualized geometry, Nanite, and Lumen, a new technology for game engines.
We see a gameplay demo for an upcoming PlayStation 5 game, running with Epic's Unreal Engine assets. These graphics use 8K textures, as Nanite allows for games to process such geometry and accurate shading without tanking performance.
Their audio rendering has also improved, giving a more immersive sound experience.
It has seamless contextual events with special animations. Light sources also can be used as gameplay elements, with the shadows adapting to the lights on the fly. 16 billion triangles are being rendered for the statues in the demo, let alone the rest of the environment and models. Limitless geometry, global illumination, all on the PS5. All realtime footage.
This is Unreal Engine 5. Coming 2021.
Fortnite will be coming to the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X at launch. In the future, Fortnite will be moving over to Unreal Engine 5.