The romance between Sony and Epic Games continues. In an interview with VG24/7, Vice President of Engineering Nick Penwarden claimed that his team rewrote Unreal Engine 5’s I/O code after witnessing what the PlayStation 5 and its oft-advertised SSD could do.
“The PlayStation 5 provides a huge leap in both computing and graphics performance, but its storage architecture is also truly special,” Warden said.
“The ability to stream in content at extreme speeds enables developers to create denser and more detailed environments, changing how we think about streaming content. It’s so impactful that we’ve rewritten our core I/O subsystems for Unreal Engine with the PlayStation 5 in mind.”
Does this mean that Unreal Engine 5 titles will look and run best on Sony’s next-gen console? That’s unlikely, but it does seem to suggest that the PlayStation 5’s hardware will live up to the hype and be fully capable of delivering some incredible, next-gen visuals.
Yesterday, Tim Sweeney clarified that while the PS5 was a significant motivator, the work that’s been accomplished for Unreal Engine 5 thus far will benefit all platforms.
There has been a massive effort to upgrade Unreal Engine loading and streaming to ensure CPU doesn’t become the bottleneck. PS5 has provided much of the impetus, but the work will benefit all platforms.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) June 3, 2020