Together with the release of Unreal Engine 5, a technodemo was released in early access, demonstrating the new capabilities of the engine. The interactive scene looks impressive, but requires 100 GB of free space and at least 32 GB of RAM. This has given rise to discussions about the growing requirements for drives in new games.
The Valley Of The Ancient demo is a short gameplay scene using all the advantages of Unreal Engine 5. In it, you can play as a girl who explores the desert world and confronts an ancient giant.
The whole environment is built using new technologies, more about which you can read in our material. Among the main features of the new demo:
- next-gen graphics using the Nanite mirkopolygon system and Lumen lighting;
- destructible objects and a large-scale world;
- realistic animation based on inverse kinematics, which can adjust the movements of the character to the objects of the environment;
- modular gameplay systems that can be fully loaded and unloaded in real time.
In addition to the new features, the size of the interactive scene caused a lot of discussion. This made users think about how much a new generation of Unreal Engine 5 games will weigh.
PC Gamer recalled a comment by developer Stephen Kick from Nightdive Studios, who said: “The only drawback I see [in the new engine] is an exponential increase in the space required to install games.”
Considering that some modern AAA games already weigh 100 GB or more, PC Gamer suggested that large and fast enough SSD drives would be needed to launch next generation titles.
Of course, do not forget about optimization and that the presented high-tech demo is designed to show the maximum capabilities of the new engine right now.
However, it is impossible not to mention the system requirements of Valley Of The Ancient. To run, you will need a 12-core processor, 32 GB of RAM and a GTX 1080 or RX Vega 64 graphics card. But for the demo to work at 30 FPS, 64 GB of RAM and an RTX 2080 or Radeon 5700 XT video card will be required. The developers also noted that they successfully launched the stage on the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.