Quote Originally Posted by PCGameN
We’re taking it none of you have forgotten the UE5 tech demo yet. Who could have? Epic Games, in a press release, said that with the upcoming engine the company is aiming to “achieve photorealism on par with movie CG and real life”, and the demo we all saw didn’t fail to impress these ambitions on us. But what we didn’t see is how GPU-intensive this demo was – it turns out, not all that much.

We recently spoke to Epic Games and learnt a little more about making Unreal Engine 5. Vice president of engineering Nick Penwarden said, “I can say that the GPU time spent rendering geometry in our UE5 demo is similar to the geometry rendering budget for Fortnite running at 60fps on consoles.” Let’s give ourselves a moment for that to sink in.

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That’s one thing that makes UE5 so exciting. If it’s true that running the UE5 demo only took the “geometry rendering budget” of Fortnite at 60fps on console, we might be in store for a game engine that really gives lower-end hardware something to work with. Sure, geometry rendering isn’t the be-all and end-all of GPU gruntwork, and the GPU isn’t the only component relevant to gaming performance, but geometry rendering certainly takes up a fair chunk of the graphics pipeline, and the GPU is the single most important component when it comes to gaming performance.

This is all in context of UE5’s ‘Nanite’, the engine’s geometry system that’s intended to help create photorealistic objects all the way up to the horizon. It does this by using millions or billions of pixel-sized, virtualised micropolygons to form the geometry of a game scene, but then downscales the detail to match the specific device it’s running on and the detail that’s required of different objects at any moment in time.

For example, as the player moves closer to an object it will stream more geometric polygons, increasing its detail – all this without the developer having to manually program objects to use LOD (level of detail) in this way.

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That amazing UE5 tech demo was only as GPU-intensive as Fortnite | PCGamesN