“Like a generational leap” - Shooter shows what Unreal Engine 5 games on the PS5 Pro should look like in the future

The PS5 Pro lets Fortnite shine in its best light.

In the past few days, there have been more and more critical voices about the PS5 Pro, especially with regard to the strong flickering in some titles. The Battle Royale long-running hit Fortnite shows that the premium console can do something different.

It has been given a Pro update and proves how much power the new luxury PS5 has in an extremely computationally intensive graphics area:Ray-Tracing.

Fortnite has received a major graphics upgrade for the PS5 Pro

The technical experts at Digital Foundry are currently providing us with new impressions of Pro-optimized patches for PS5 games almost every day.

For a new video, for example, the team chose the long-standing multiplayer hitselected:

Link toYouTube content

As expected, the title runs a little smoother, offers a higher resolution and brings... Oops!Hardware-based ray tracing!

This creates, among other things, much more accurate reflections, as you can see here:

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The ship's reflection is far more accurate and doesn't have as many weird black spots. In addition, shadows on the ropes are displayed and reflected better.

In addition, the lighting is a lot more precise, many more shadows are cast and there are fewer display errors. For example, shadowed patches of grass flicker significantly less often when moving and light no longer shines through thin walls or doors as often as soon as they are obscured by the player character or a weapon.

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As we approach the Battle Royale island, it becomes clear that ray tracing is calculated at greater distances. Shadows appear more realistic and windows no longer appear almost black, but allow light to pass through.

The real-time calculated lighting of the game world and the shading are also applied to dynamic objects and here the responsible Digital Foundry editor Alexander Battaglia speaks of a “generational difference”.

Vehicles and characters appear realistically integrated into the game world,cast correct shadows and are illuminated by reflected light:

That's why hardware ray tracing is such a big step for Unreal Engine 5

It's been almost two years since Fortnite was upgraded for Unreal Engine 5 and was given a number of new features such as Lumens for dynamic lighting or Nanites for more detailed textures.You can find an explanation of the techniques here:

Fortnite with Unreal Engine 5:

But the lumen technology used for the credible light calculations also had a few weaknesses because it worked purely on a software basis. In order for this to work with the resource-saving modification of ray tracing, precise ray tracing was not used; instead, so-called “signed distance fields” were used.

This is a function that aligns shapes depending on their distances, i.e. walls, trees, houses, etc. are simplified by Unreal Engine 5 and then summarized in such a way that not every pixel has to be calculated during ray tracing .

You can see the process here, several groups form the basic framework for efficient light and shadow calculation in the software instead of via the hardware:

With indirect lighting, for example when light from a blue umbrella bounces off the surrounding walls and turns them blue, this works quite well because diffuse light does not have to be represented precisely.

However, reflections reveal a glaring disadvantage:The signed distance fields there are comparatively unpleasant because they are anything but detailed.

With hardware ray tracing, these problems are far less noticeable.The reflections are created with greater precision, depending on how many details the developers allow. Fortnite still doesn't show absolutely exact reflections, but they are much closer to the "original".

The result is an even fancier battle royale shooter that has received a serious authenticity boost.

No graphics upgrade in 120 Hertz mode

You can only see the additional graphics pomp in 60 fps mode.If you play competitively at 120 fps, everything stays the same.Even Lumen based on Signed Distance Field doesn't seem efficient enough for such a high frame rate.

That's a shame, of course, but also no surprise since the PS5 Pro doesn't offer twice as much performance all at once. At least oneWe would still like to see this mode, as it could unlock the frame rate on supported televisions for even more fps and a low lag in image output.

Fortnite could lay the foundation for the entire UE5 generation

Hardware ray tracing on the console is an absolute novelty when it comes to Unreal Engine 5. The PS5 was previously too weak for this, but the Pro has enough performance to create the stylish lighting effects and reflections in this way.

And the power seems to be enough even without PSSR:Epic Games has apparently deliberately decided not to implement Sony's own AI scaler in order to avoid annoying shimmer artifacts like in theorto avoid.

More games could be based on this.Signed Distance Fields are often used for dynamic lighting and it would probably work without them on the PS5 Pro. Just like without PSSR, which currently doesn't seem sophisticated enough for games with ray tracing. So we're excited to see how Unreal Engine 5 develops on the PS5 Pro.

What do you think of the innovations? Would you like to see fancy reflections more often in Unreal Engine 5 games?