For those who haven't seen it yet, the just-released Unreal Engine 5 footage is an absolute must-watch. In my thirty five years of playing video games, it's the single most impressive demo I've ever seen. That said and as potentially game-changing as I think it is-- no LODs? no light baking? get out of town!-- one should also toss in a dose of realistic skepticism.

Nothing is free. At the end of the day, actual silicon needs to crunch these mind-blowingly massive data structures through its pipeline. If drawing a billion triangles with bounce global illumination was as easy as just writing some new software, it would have been done ages ago.

Rather, I think the big innovation here isn't as much graphical fidelity as it is a mitigation for ever-rising project budgets: to name just one example, being able to import raw models into the engine without manually making different LOD versions of them, and without needing to generate and tinker with normal maps, then watching the engine automatically scale resolution, shader quality, and triangle "fidelity" to meet configurable performance profiles, is going to save a ton of manpower.

And then there are those features which are simply "nice-to-haves" which could have just as well been bolted on to Unreal Engine 4: for instance, it will be cool having the engine dynamically adjust player models to make them realistically interact with-- presumably even dynamic-- world geometry. Those "icing" additions should not be discounted.