The Unreal Engine 5 has yet to reach its full potential, but mid-generation refresh hardware like the Playstation 5 Pro could help the engine make the jump in terms of visual quality that many already expected to see.
Answering a question from a fan, the tech experts at Digital Foundry highlighted how better console hardware like the rumored Playstation 5 Pro could definitely drive developers to use the full suite of UE5 features, including Lumen and Nanite, delivering higher quality visuals with more stable performance.
Even features that are supported by released games could see an improvement. Hellblade II: Senua's Saga, for example, it's one of the most impressive games powered by the latest version of Epic's engine to date, but it only features software Lumen.
A Playstation 5 Pro with better specs over the base models, and increased ray-traced performance, for example, could be able to use hardware Lumen and give console players a taste of what is already possible to achieve on PC with much better hardware. Related Story Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demos Comparison Videos Highlights How Visual Improvements Over UE4 Are Not Enough to Justify 100 FPS Performance HitEven in its current state, however, the Unreal Engine 5 can deliver some impressive visuals, as highlighted by multiple tech demos.
The Feudal Japan demo, powered by UE 5.4, delivers some impressive visuals even at 1080p resolution, but performance at native 4K leaves quite a bit to be desired even on a powerful GPU like the RTX 4080, as shown in a video shared by MxBenchmarkPC on YouTube.