As usual, Unreal’s demo are always super impressive. New features in Unreal Engine 5: unlimited polygon, real-time global illumination. Other than realistic animation, these are like the holy-grail of real-time graphics. We’ll have to wait till 2021 to see if they can deliver these in actual production.
The following images are not 3D renders. They are screenshots from the actual real-time demo.
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality