Last week, Epic released Unreal Engine 5 for early access, along with a sample demo project – Valley of the Ancient – for developers to explore. Crucial to UE5 are two fundamental new technologies: Nanite, which aims to deliver something akin to 'infinite detail' and Lumen, a state of the art global illumination solution. At its maximum 'epic' settings, the demo targets 1080p at 30 frames per second on PS5 and Xbox Series X. However, another new technology – Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) uses smart upscaling to deliver a convincing 4K presentation. This is cutting-edge stuff and having now spent some time with UE5 on PC, we have some impressions and initial performance numbers.
First of all, there's nothing to stop anybody downloading this initial early access version of UE5, and you can do so for free. However, it is worth bearing in mind that this is far from the complete rendition of the code and key features and optimisations are missing. Over and above the engine download itself, the Valley of the Ancient demo project is a separate 100GB download. This is using raw assets though – a compiled build clocks in at around 25GB. As for the demo content itself, it's pretty simple, and we've got a sample run-through shown operating on an RTX 3080 further on down the page. Essentially, you get some exploration elements allowing you to appreciate the enormous quality of the presentation (and how Nanite can deliver a vast open world) plus a boss battle to show off more interactivity.
The notion of this being a 1080p30 demonstration has raised some eyebrows, but this is UE5 running at epic settings and the Lumen global illumination solution is around twice as heavy on performance as the initial PS5 demo we saw last year (which operated at circa 1400p). Also, object stacking of multiple discrete Nanite meshes to create the world also presents additional overhead. However, TSR really delivers an impressive upscaling solution – not quite as clean and crisp at a native 4K output, but certainly comparable, and far beyond actual 1080p native. There has been some conjecture that this new demo is a multi-platform 'downgrade' compared to last year's PS5 demo, but this has been shot down by Epic's engineering fellow (graphics) Brian Karis, who has confirmed in a live stream that the last demo runs just fine on PCs and Xbox Series X too.
