What Unreal Engine 5 will be quite hardware intensive It was something we already knew, or at least could have imagined, thanks to recent demonstrations, which, yes, made it clear to us that this development environment represents a great evolutionary leap with respect. to its predecessor and as a result we can expect the titles developed with Unreal Engine 5 to be spectacular … and spectacularly challenging.

However, and although we could already get an idea of ​​it, we can start checking it right nowand it’s even more shocking than we could expect. Remember the Unreal Engine 5 demo that came out with the second Matrix Resurrections trailer? Well, a few days ago, the Megacity Sample Project was launched, which is nothing but the city that was used to create the demo, and in which we could see Lumen, Nanite and Metahumans, the three key technologies of Unreal Engine 5, in operation. .

So it was only a matter of time before someone with a computer “top of the range” went to test the city … or more precisely to test their computer according to the requirements of Unreal Engine 5. It happened and as we can see in this video, Epic showed what can be done in Unreal Engine 5, but at the cost of exaggerated performance. And that’s the team with Intel Core i912900K well complemented by NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and 32 GB RAM. And with those wicker with resolution 4Kthe framerate remained between 30 and 50 images.

Yes, it is true that we are talking about quite high resolution, but we must not lose sight of the hardware we are talking about today. one of the highest performance options we can use. And yes, I know that above the RTX 3090 is the RTX 3090 Ti, but the jump we can expect from one model to another will not be a huge jump. Distinctive, yes, spectacular, no.

Unreal Engine 5 and others new gen

So when we see the performance of the Megacity Sample Project on a high-end PC (actually very high), the first thing we need to think about is what happens when you try to transfer the experience from Unreal Engine 5 to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. Because if the top of the current generation of graphics adapters could occasionally reach only 30 frames per second, what can we expect from two devices whose graphics adapters are part of an APU (with the limitations that come with it) and with a single memory?

And no, I don’t lose the Matrix demo for PlayStation 5, but again, we’re talking about a demo. What happens when a full game wants to get the most out of Unreal Engine 5? Ok what you will most likely find that you cannot do itbecause the performance of the current generation of consoles may decline very, very soon. And we’re talking about consoles that have been on the market for just over a year.

The next generation of PC graphics, the RTX 40 and RX 7000 series, which will debut in a few months, can now fully meet what Unreal Engine 5 requires, or more precisely, they will be able to squeeze all or much of the juice from the Epic Games development environment. With consoles, however, neither the current ones nor probably their “Pro” revisions, which mean half the life of this generation, will get to it.

And what will development studios that rely on Unreal Engine 5 do? In an ideal world, clearly differentiated versions, optimized for each platform. In the real world, we are quite likely to see a lot new versions unable to take advantage of the performance of the most advanced systems. And once again, we will have to listen and repeat that in many cases, consoles burden the level of technical development of games. And we’re talking about a new generation, I repeat. A new generation that isn’t really that new.

We told you a few days ago that the Xbox SeriesX will finally not have ray tracing in Minecraft. Technology that I can use perfectly on a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 3750H, GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile and 18 GB RAM. Of course, I don’t expect my system to be able to handle Unreal Engine 5 very well, but the next generation consoles aim to do the same, I find this remarkably remarkable. Let’s wait for what happens when the first games arrive.