Unreal Engine 5 should run on a RTX 2070 Super

Last week, we were given a look at Unreal Engine 5 running on the PlayStation 5 and we've now found out what graphics card would be required to do so on a PC - a RTX 2070 Super. 

The trailer for Unreal Engine 5 was suitably impressive, dubbed Lumen in the Land of Nanite and showing off what could be accomplished in terms of environment and character detail. The engine uses a new geometry processing engine called Nanite which hopes to virtually eliminate polygon budgets for developers thanks to automatic stream and scaling which then eliminates the need to develop LOD levels for particular assets. Besides being smarter, it looks far superior too. 

There's also the addition of the Lumen global illumination engine which again saves developers effort by eliminating the need to manually bake light maps but also means that changes in lighting conditions look as seamless and as integrated as possible. 

It's all intended to supplement what we already have in the Unreal Engine such as Niagara VFX and Chaos destruction systems, and Epic is aiming for an early 2021 release. Notably, Fortnite will be ported into the engine. And of course, there's the little matter of the trailer running real-time on a PlayStation 5 so that's obviously going to play a pivotal role. 

Don't get too excited for your PC gaming just yet though. Analysis by World Today News reckons that you'll need at least a GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card to run the demo. It compares the PlayStation 5 graphics accelerator and the GeForce RTX 2070 Super, noting that the PlayStation 5 is capable of providing up to 10.28 TFLOPS while the the Nvidia GPU should achieve about 9 TFLOPS.

This shouldn't be an issue too soon at least. For one thing, Unreal Engine 5 won't launch until early next year and we know there should be a new wave of Nvidia GPUs announced later this year, but it does give us a bit of insight into the direction of things. At least when it comes to high-end games because - after all - not every developer will be embracing the technology just straight away.