Unreal Engine 5 Impresses in The Coalition's Demo; Is This What Gears 6 Will Look Like?
Gears of War owner The Coalition unveiled an impressive tech demo showing off the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.
The Coalition presented Alpha Point, a tech demo designed to showcase the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5. The team prepared the project for this year's online edition of Game Developers Conference.
The demo runs on Xbox Series X at 46 fps and was upscaled to 4K using Temporal Super Resolution, a technology developed by Epic Games that offers solutions similar to Nvidia's DLSS. Alpha Point is visually impressive in terms of the level of detail in its environment and lighting system. The Coalition also showed off a great-looking character model.
The studio also shared a handful of stats that give a good indication of the progression in detail level. Most of the graphic elements in Alpha Point consists of about 300 - 500 thousand polygons. This is fifteen times more than the average for Gears 5. The studio also revealed that in the case of the sample character model, the eyelashes alone consist of 3,500 polygons. Two console generations ago, back in the Xbox 360 era, this number was enough for an entire character model.
The Coalition is a studio responsible for developing the Gears of War franchise. The team's presentation of the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 can therefore give a taste of what to expect from the visuals of Gears 6 or Gears Tactics 2. In May, the team confirmed that the next Gears is being developed on this engine.
Recall that the first demo of UE5 was presented in May last year. Developers other than Epic Games had to wait a long time before they got the opportunity to test the technology. The engine was made available in early access only a year later. Since then, we could see some interesting experiments. One modder recreated the Inferno and Dust 2 maps from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in Unreal Engine 5, while another did the same with a famous location from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
