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Epic Game's Unreal Engine has now hit version 5.6, and judging from the Witcher 4 demo it showcased recently it's a further step into the uncanny.
Okay, first up, this isn't the gameplay that some daftness circulating round the inter webs says that it is. Rather this is a technical demo showing off some of the technical foundation that CD PROJEKT RED is planning for the next episode in the Witcher saga games. And even when you realise it's not, say, running in realtime on a PS5 - as if! - it's still stupidly impressive.
The first two and a half minutes is the demo, then it widens out to a bit more of an explanation of what the team is up to at the State of Unreal presentation at the recent Unreal Fest in Orlando. It's an impressive watch.
Unreal Engine 5.6 dropped at the start of June and brings with it some fairly hefty improvements. Basically it delivers the optimized toolsets artists need to build and deliver games that consistently render at 60 fps on kit such as current-generation consoles, high-end PCs, and mobile devices.
The Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) system enhancements are designed to deliver even greater performance for Lumen Global Illumination. By eliminating key CPU bottlenecks, artists can therefore author more complex scenes while maintaining that smoother frame rate. The new Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin will also allow for more of those jaw-dropping cityscapes that have become such a staple of fantasy productions, allowing for a greater amount of immutable static geometry in artificial worlds that will load faster with constant frame rates.
There are a whole host of animation and rigging workflow updates, a streamlined UX/UI, enhanced procedural worldbuilding tools that pull off neat tricks such as blending biomes to create more geography at speed, and ramped up in-engine MetaHuman creation to easily populate these worlds with more life.
More details (and more sumptuous graphics) here.
Tags: Technology Unreal Engine
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