Thanks to Epic Games’s Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, there are a lot of PlayStation 5 fanboys out there who believe the console will usher in a generational leap that puts even the most graphically impressive PC titles to shame. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has fueled this thought with his comments regarding the PS5’s storage architecture, which is reportedly years ahead of what we’ve got today and makes experiences like the one teased in the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo possible.
Well, it turns out that PC gamers have nothing to worry about, as usual. During a recent livestream, employees from Epic Games’s China division (via DSOGaming) revealed that the demo runs pretty well on modern hardware. More specifically, a notebook with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 mobile GPU and Samsung 970 EVO SSD was able to run the demo at 40 FPS. While some are claiming that the demo didn’t push the PS5’s SSD and storage speeds to their limits, the revelation puts a bit of a damper into Sweeney’s suggestions.
Previously, Eurogamer learned from Epic’s VP of engineering, Nick Penwarden, that the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo only ran at QHD 30 FPS on the PlayStation 5. “In the demo, we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time,” Penwarden admitted.
The demo also lacks any kind of ray tracing. “Hardware accelerated ray tracing will be supported in Unreal Engine 5, for example, but it’s not a part of the PS5 tech demo revealed today.”