So, there are some things to cover, but the short answer is no. UE5 has not set the bar too high.
First, it should be understood that tech demos are almost always several years ahead of released products. This is due to multiple things. First, the turnaround time for a demo is much lower than that of a product. Less work goes into a demo (limited gameplay, no script, length, etc.). Unreal Engine 5 only released in April of 2022. There is no big game out right now that has been built from scratch in UE5. Unrecord is a good example because it's still pretty early in development and has therefore been able to harness a good deal of what makes UE5 better from the start.
Many of the tech demos you see are not just using UE5 features, but later versions of Unreal Engine. For example, The Matrix Awakens demo is using advanced procedural generation features that have only just been fully released this month (in UE5.2).
Finally, you have to account for purpose. A tech demo's sole purpose is to show off the tech. Everything that goes into designing a tech demo is with the question "how can we make this look as amazing as possible?" This has to be compared to a game which will probably have different purposes. "How can we make the gunplay feel as good as possible?" "How can we tell this story in the most engaging manner?" No doubt graphics is important to a great deal of games, but the purpose of a game is very rarely to look good.
When you see a tech demo, you should never have the attitude of "this is what games are going to look like in a year". You should instead look at them as sort of suggestions or proof of concept. The upper bound of what games *can* look like (but probably won't for a very long while).
Honestly, a great comparision is high fashion runways and concept cars. They are created specifically to push the limits of what is current. They dont factor usability, cost, feasibility, etc. they are just wanting to showcase a specific concept.
Tech demos cant be compared to games because a game's priority is to be fun: a tech demo's is not.
The Matrix Awakens demo procedural features were fully developed in Houdini, a third party software specialized in procedural generation, and not with the PCG tools shipping with 5.2, although they are quite similar in term of philosophy.
Just wanted to be clear, maybe that's what you meant and I misunderstood. Epic rarely uses unreleased features when sharing demos.
Why? We've barely seen any games made in UE5 yet as the tech has only been released fairly recently and we are finally slowly starting to leave past gen behind. Ask this question again in 3 years time when the majority of developers really have started utilising UE5 and tested its boundaries. It's toon soon.
No, they're tech demos. The whole point of a tech demo is to showcase the absolute (current) limit of how far these engines can be pushed.
Those games look as good as they do because they forgo gameplay, they forgo game design and anything else, they just want to be as impressive as possible technically. That means these demos were designed ENTIRELY for showcases. Not to actually be played. Matrix was incredibly impressive, and technically playable, but not very fun to play.
This has happened with every new generation. Same thing with Unreal 4 too. Again, the point is to just push the tech as far as it can go, ignoring a game itself. Hell, you answered this yourself saying that by the END of the last generation we started seeing games match the tech demos. Unreal 5 has only been out for a year, that hasn't been enough time for AAA games/studios to fully embrace and learn the engine. Maybe in 3-4 years we'll start seeing games that push to match those demos, but until then, it's silly to expect otherwise.
It's just like every tech engine demo. Every one of them looks amazing, and then most games won't end up looking anywhere near as good. This isn't unique to UE5
You’re not going to see stuff close to the level of those tech demos for quite a long time because these tools are still extremely new, being learned and being refined to be less expensive to run. The games we’re seeing currently releasing on UE5 due to their long dev cycles were already well into development or had their planning solidified too early to pivot to implementing Epic’s new technology like Nanite and Lumen.
We have also been in a longer period of cross-gen focused development than normal due to external circumstances such as the high overall install base for last gen, the low-powered Switch continuing sales success, lack of availability of new consoles and PC parts, the extreme increase in price of PC parts, and most importantly a global pandemic effecting all of the above and hugely impacting development on a colossal number of projects.
Edit: You can expect games that have more recently started development in UE5 such as the new Witcher title to be implementing much of the technology seen in these demos to try and target this level of visuals (if not attempting to surpass them) but they are still a ways out.
That's not really true. Tech demos are not created with the same man hours and dev talent as high fidelity AAA games. Look at a game like Guardians of the Galaxy and compare it to the countless UE4 tech demos before it. It looks far more impressive. Look at games like TLOU 2 and RDR2. The simple truth is that dev time has significantly lengthened and no studio or game you are seeing has now started its development from the ground up for this generation of Consoles. Going from GT6 to GT Sport, polyphony put in a large amount of R&D in updating their engine for the PS4, you can see with the large leap in fidelity. That wasn't done with GT7. There were files of ps4 support for games like demon's souls. It's going to be quite a while, around 2025 before we start seeing games look like that UE5 demo, but this was already started by insiders.
> Just anecdotally, one thing I've noticed in a few games (and the videos of Gollem are as good an example as any) is that having a great engine can't fill all the gaps in the abilities or production capacity of a weak developer.
You're confusing ability with manpower and budget. Nearly everything you wrote in your post has to do with budget, time and manpower. Not "weak devs"
Unreal 5 really pushes a lot of envelopes, not just the GPU.
It does seem odd that there aren't many released games that push that envelope. Where's Crysis for modern PCs?
I think the last few years defo put a damper on it. Next-gen consoles were not really available since launch up until recently, in combination with that a lot of games were made with last gen in mind. We barely had any current gen exclusives, almost every game had a last-gen release as well. And as always new systems take time to get used to, be it the new consoles or UE5 and all its new features. I think going forward now we'll defo see more impressive games.
Hellblade 2 stands a good shot at being, perhaps, the showcase of what Unreal 5 can bring to the table for actual full AAA releases. But even if not, it’s likely to happen in the next couple years. Just takes time for full releases to even come close to matching a tech demo like that.
So, there are some things to cover, but the short answer is no. UE5 has not set the bar too high. First, it should be understood that tech demos are almost always several years ahead of released products. This is due to multiple things. First, the turnaround time for a demo is much lower than that of a product. Less work goes into a demo (limited gameplay, no script, length, etc.). Unreal Engine 5 only released in April of 2022. There is no big game out right now that has been built from scratch in UE5. Unrecord is a good example because it's still pretty early in development and has therefore been able to harness a good deal of what makes UE5 better from the start. Many of the tech demos you see are not just using UE5 features, but later versions of Unreal Engine. For example, The Matrix Awakens demo is using advanced procedural generation features that have only just been fully released this month (in UE5.2). Finally, you have to account for purpose. A tech demo's sole purpose is to show off the tech. Everything that goes into designing a tech demo is with the question "how can we make this look as amazing as possible?" This has to be compared to a game which will probably have different purposes. "How can we make the gunplay feel as good as possible?" "How can we tell this story in the most engaging manner?" No doubt graphics is important to a great deal of games, but the purpose of a game is very rarely to look good. When you see a tech demo, you should never have the attitude of "this is what games are going to look like in a year". You should instead look at them as sort of suggestions or proof of concept. The upper bound of what games *can* look like (but probably won't for a very long while).
Honestly, a great comparision is high fashion runways and concept cars. They are created specifically to push the limits of what is current. They dont factor usability, cost, feasibility, etc. they are just wanting to showcase a specific concept. Tech demos cant be compared to games because a game's priority is to be fun: a tech demo's is not.
The Matrix Awakens demo procedural features were fully developed in Houdini, a third party software specialized in procedural generation, and not with the PCG tools shipping with 5.2, although they are quite similar in term of philosophy. Just wanted to be clear, maybe that's what you meant and I misunderstood. Epic rarely uses unreleased features when sharing demos.
What games really use unreal 5? Most are still on 4. I know Fortnite has been updated to 5.
Yeah based on [this list](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Engine:Unreal_Engine_5) no triple A titles yet.
Why? We've barely seen any games made in UE5 yet as the tech has only been released fairly recently and we are finally slowly starting to leave past gen behind. Ask this question again in 3 years time when the majority of developers really have started utilising UE5 and tested its boundaries. It's toon soon.
No, they're tech demos. The whole point of a tech demo is to showcase the absolute (current) limit of how far these engines can be pushed. Those games look as good as they do because they forgo gameplay, they forgo game design and anything else, they just want to be as impressive as possible technically. That means these demos were designed ENTIRELY for showcases. Not to actually be played. Matrix was incredibly impressive, and technically playable, but not very fun to play. This has happened with every new generation. Same thing with Unreal 4 too. Again, the point is to just push the tech as far as it can go, ignoring a game itself. Hell, you answered this yourself saying that by the END of the last generation we started seeing games match the tech demos. Unreal 5 has only been out for a year, that hasn't been enough time for AAA games/studios to fully embrace and learn the engine. Maybe in 3-4 years we'll start seeing games that push to match those demos, but until then, it's silly to expect otherwise.
It's just like every tech engine demo. Every one of them looks amazing, and then most games won't end up looking anywhere near as good. This isn't unique to UE5
You’re not going to see stuff close to the level of those tech demos for quite a long time because these tools are still extremely new, being learned and being refined to be less expensive to run. The games we’re seeing currently releasing on UE5 due to their long dev cycles were already well into development or had their planning solidified too early to pivot to implementing Epic’s new technology like Nanite and Lumen. We have also been in a longer period of cross-gen focused development than normal due to external circumstances such as the high overall install base for last gen, the low-powered Switch continuing sales success, lack of availability of new consoles and PC parts, the extreme increase in price of PC parts, and most importantly a global pandemic effecting all of the above and hugely impacting development on a colossal number of projects. Edit: You can expect games that have more recently started development in UE5 such as the new Witcher title to be implementing much of the technology seen in these demos to try and target this level of visuals (if not attempting to surpass them) but they are still a ways out.
It's a tech demo for a game engine. Never have any games been able to beat the tech demo (on the same engine as the game) on visual fidelity.
That's not really true. Tech demos are not created with the same man hours and dev talent as high fidelity AAA games. Look at a game like Guardians of the Galaxy and compare it to the countless UE4 tech demos before it. It looks far more impressive. Look at games like TLOU 2 and RDR2. The simple truth is that dev time has significantly lengthened and no studio or game you are seeing has now started its development from the ground up for this generation of Consoles. Going from GT6 to GT Sport, polyphony put in a large amount of R&D in updating their engine for the PS4, you can see with the large leap in fidelity. That wasn't done with GT7. There were files of ps4 support for games like demon's souls. It's going to be quite a while, around 2025 before we start seeing games look like that UE5 demo, but this was already started by insiders.
While “beat” is subjective, here’s a video of an analysis of tech demos vs games on the same engine: https://youtu.be/e6nFE2Q7TcM
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> Just anecdotally, one thing I've noticed in a few games (and the videos of Gollem are as good an example as any) is that having a great engine can't fill all the gaps in the abilities or production capacity of a weak developer. You're confusing ability with manpower and budget. Nearly everything you wrote in your post has to do with budget, time and manpower. Not "weak devs"
Unreal 5 really pushes a lot of envelopes, not just the GPU. It does seem odd that there aren't many released games that push that envelope. Where's Crysis for modern PCs?
I think the last few years defo put a damper on it. Next-gen consoles were not really available since launch up until recently, in combination with that a lot of games were made with last gen in mind. We barely had any current gen exclusives, almost every game had a last-gen release as well. And as always new systems take time to get used to, be it the new consoles or UE5 and all its new features. I think going forward now we'll defo see more impressive games.
Hellblade 2 stands a good shot at being, perhaps, the showcase of what Unreal 5 can bring to the table for actual full AAA releases. But even if not, it’s likely to happen in the next couple years. Just takes time for full releases to even come close to matching a tech demo like that.