Unreal Engine 5 Was Overhyped

But it’s still a promising platform

Unreal Engine 5 demo screenshot captured by the author. Look at that amazing blur and all those details! Will we ever see this stuff in a real console game?

Four years ago, Epic dropped a lengthy tech demo video onto the internet, describing in detail all the new graphics features that we would soon experience thanks to the “magic” of Unreal Engine 5.

It’s typical for these videos to feature PC-level assets running on high-end hardware that’s never fully disclosed behind the scenes, in order to present things in the best possible light. However, for this demo Epic did something that I think ultimately set the hype meter way too high: they claimed it was all running in real-time on a PS5.

The video (which you can still see here) proudly shows off the two key pillars of the engine: Lumen and Nanite. Lumen is meant to replace older lighting pipelines with a modern system driven by ray traced global illumination, offering detailed shadows, reflections, and bounce lighting. Nanite renders all the geometry behind the game’s visuals, theoretically switching between detail levels on the fly and on a per-pixel basis, supposedly allowing artists to put high quality assets into games and not worry about optimization.

Now, this was in May of 2020, several months before the PS5 launched, so the only people who had their hands on the hardware with any regular time were development studios. The first year of the console saw…