PS5, Xbox Series X Will Have Movie-Quality Graphics Says Epic Exec

The dream to have movie-quality visuals in video games will finally come true with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X says Epic Games chief technology officer Kim Liberi.

“It has been a lifelong dream of mine that real-time computer graphics, and in particular games, can be as believable and realistic as a movie,” Liberi said. Video Games Chronicle notes that what will help him achieve this goal is Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite tech.

“Next-gen graphics and processing power will not only make games more immersive, but will also enable entirely new gameplay concepts that can take advantage of fully dynamic environments and lighting, much-improved physics, smarter AI, and richer multiplayer experiences,” Liberi said.

After partnering with Sony for the unveiling of Unreal Engine 5 that was shown running “live on PlayStation 5” through the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo in May, UE5 will supposedly allow artists to import film-quality source art comprised of hundreds of millions or billions of polygons directly into the engine.

That same Nanite technology will then scale the assets in real-time, significantly reducing time spent adjusting them for game performance and with “no loss in quality.”

“For many years, the movie industry has been experimenting with Unreal Engine for previsualization and cinematic shot design, and then last year Jon Favreau and LucasFilm made the leap to use Unreal to generate final pixels for in-camera visual effects on ‘The Mandalorian,’” Liberi said of their collaboration with LucasFilm on the hit Disney+ show.

“You can now create environments with full-quality cinematic assets and the engine does all the heavy lifting, resulting in some truly photorealistic results,” Liberi said while saying that asset-scaling tech like Nanite could broaden the technology’s appeal past just AAA game developers.

“Independent developers tend to wear a lot of hats,” he said as reported by Video Games Chronicle. “They are designers, artists, programmers, and storytellers, and removing the time they have to spend on the technical details of game development allows them to spend more time on what makes their game fun and unique.”

Epic Games says the Unreal Engine 5 middleware will run on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Current generation consoles will also run Unreal Engine 5 after a full release late next year.