Last year, Epic Games unveiled their upcoming new game engine, Unreal Engine 5. In a recent interview with Gamesradar, Epic Games gave a bit more background on the process of the engine’s development. Chiefly, that we have the Playstation 5 to thank for Unreal 5 existing to begin with thanks to next-gen power.
According to Brian Karis and Tim Sweeney, Epic began talking with Mark Cerny of Sony several years ago, about possibilities for the next generation. The power of the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 had a lot of speculation going by that point, especially after the PS4 Pro and Xbox Series X were released.
The ability for the consoles to not have latency between their processor and the actual game, along with storage in general, was a big obstacle for the engine to overcome, for gaming and Epic’s plans. With the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X’s expanded memory, with its high bandwidth and low-latency framework, Unreal Engine 5 had an actual shot.
With the huge amount of polygons that the new engine has to render, alongside things like lighting, particle effects, and the high-quality visuals, it’s no surprise that Unreal Engine 5 took a whole new generation of console to put into action. And that’s not all.
The Unreal Engine also makes it so that instead of having to put in both the data and the memory, only the data is necessary. With just that, it means that areas can load a lot faster without the same sort of load on the console that it would be for a last-gen console or something similar.
Considering how ubiquitous Unreal Engine 4 was during its lifetime, we can likely expect a lot of upcoming games to make use of Unreal Engine 5 in the future. Hopefully, as with Unreal Engine 4, it will be able to give us the sort of quality we’ve come to expect from the engines.
