Gaming

Epic announces Unreal Engine 5 support for Xbox Series X and PS5 with PS5 demo

Published

3 years ago

May 14, 2020

Karl Sorensen

Epic Games the maker of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine game development platform announced Unreal Engine 5 for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5.

“The graphics speak for themselves. And Epic has always pushed the bleeding edge of what’s possible,” CEO Tim Sweeney tells The Verge. “Our goal isn’t just to bring more features to developers. The hardest problem in game development right now is building high quality games takes enormous time and cost. So we want to make developers’ lives easier and more productive.”

In order to show off Unreal Engine 5 in action, Epic showed of a demo running on a dev version of PS5 hardware.

Epic said that the demo shows off what the next-gen super consoles will be capable of as soon as developers get access to tools like UE5 and can leverage every ounce of power out of the Xbox Series X and PS5.

“the next-gen consoles are going to give consumers a quantum leap, and UE5 is another leap on top of that.”
Kim Libreri, Epic Chief Technology Officer

Epic says that the goal of UE5 is to remove the scalability issues for developers, so that the games can be played on any form-factor, ” Each generation introduces a new set of problems you don’t have to worry about. We’re trying to remove the content scalability content problem from this generation,” says Tim Sweeney. Sweeney is referencing Fornite as an example of a scalable game that not only can be run on consoles, but Desktops, Laptops, Tablets and Smartphones. Epic says UE5 will not only support Xbox Series X and PS5 but Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.

“Sony has really done an awesome job of architecting a great system,” says Sweeney. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. They’re going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.’” The PS5, combined with tools like UE5, will enable “nothing but seamless, continuous worlds, and you can have this degree of fidelity going on for as many kilometers and gigabytes as you wish,” Sweeney adds.