The Unreal Engine 5 demo was demonstrating two key technologies.
Nanite and Lumin. - That is it.
It's not meant for anything more than that, it's what we can expect from those two technologies, not from the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X as a whole. Get excited.

Read Dead Redemption 2 and Gears 5 have a ton of key rendering technologies being prevalent in their presentation... So they are not comparable to the Unreal 5 demo.
Wait until the Unreal 5 Engine is out and we can see it's entire rendering pipeline that is available, there may be regressions in fidelity in some areas to bolster fidelity in a multitude of others.

Native 4k isn't really necessary for modern games. 1800p with decent upscaling tec, is almost indistinguishable from native 4k. Devs can use the GPU for more effects etc than push pixels. Like going from 1800p to 4k is just over 30% more pixels. And upscaled 1440p internal resolution is only a bit softer in details than that.

Though for less demanding games with an underutilized GPU, then why not. Go ham on 4k with bells and whistles.

The need for 4k will vary depending on a variety factors like your own eyesight acuity, panel size, panel quality, distance from the display, environmental conditions (I.E Dark vs Light room.) and rendering techniques employed. (Like Anti-Aliasing.)

Thus some users will notice a visual difference between 1800P and 4k.

Irregardless the visual fidelity shown in the demo is leaps and bounds beyond what we've seen on current gen for any similar scene. There is no real demonstration of current platforms being able to render such a scene. 

I think maybe you misread my comment.

"We will for sure see plenty of native 4k PS5/Xbox One games, but they won't be the most graphically impressive."

For example RDR2 is 720p on Xbox One. Xbox On X is a premium, late gen machine (2017) rendering the same game at 4k. It doesn't at all reflect the burden of rendering games with next gen fidelity. All of the games it hits 4k on were built around much weaker 2013 machines. So it shouldn't be used as the baseline for what to expect unless you aren't expecting much more improvement in the next 7 years outside of resolution. There will also be games which do hit every mark (top end visuals, 60fps, max res) like Gears 5, but they will be much rarer. Cross gen games will of course hit 4k but when next gen games actually strive for photorealism & cinema level visuals effects/simulations, native 4k will be the first thing they sacrifice. First parties will more frequently hit 4k but the majority of games are third party and likely will not (again not referring to cross gen games built around PS4/Xbox One specs)

Also Microsoft literally demoed the Xbox Series X with Minecraft running at 1080p with raytracing. People will act like 1080p is some horrible resolution but the reality (especially with incoming improvment to upscalling/image reconstruction) is that its not bad for 90% of people playing games on TV. For sure developers will leverage it for 60fps/120fps modes, raytracing options and it will be featured in the lower end of dynamic resolution targets.

Ultimately achieving this at 4k is a lot easier

than achieving this (all whilst taking into account the difference in physics and real time lighting present in the actual presentations)

In any case we won't have to wait too long before we can actually start using actual games as reference instead of that UE5 demo

The visuals were purely targeted on two aspects. Nanite and Lumin. Yes, they were impressive. - No, they aren't the best we have ever seen... Especially on the lighting side.

The demo isn't a representation of next-gen games, it's meant to demonstrate those two key technologies and that is all.

Next-gen games will be more intricate, will have more simulation than that demo and will employ a plethora of post-process effects and reconstruction techniques and more to really make a step beyond what we saw.

That demo for example, whilst it did use Ray Tracing... It did NOT use the Ray Tracing processing cores on the Playstation 5, so there is extra graphics left on the table so to speak.

I would love to see better on current gen platforms if you have any examples. 

As for the rest, for sure. My point is not to use the resolution targets of current gen games running on Xbox One X because those games do not boast next gen visuals. Its like expecting PS4 Pro to hit native 4k with TLOU2 because it managed to do it with the skyrim remaster.

"The Tomorrow Children" on Playstation 4 had full dynamic global illumination.


"Metro Exodus" on PC has full hardware accelerated Ray Traced Global Illumination. It is damn costly, but also one of the best lighting implementations out.


This is in stark contrast to Lumin which uses signed distance fields and screen space data for parts of the lighting rendering pipeline in order to save on processing... Plus Voxel based global illumination, which is a rough approximation.

We also cannot forget StarCitizen.



P.S. Don't mention to CGI that someone is talking about Metro on the forum. He will get moist.

Yeah there are other factors in it as well but I don't think the tiniest hit in IQ is worth the performance deficit. Its getting a to a point of good enough, like this article that tests AMD's image sharpening tech. I very much doubt most would even discern a difference even when put side by side; but even then why are those people even playing on consoles :P