Unreal Engine 5's new temporal AA upscaling is great for PS5, Series X

Next-gen consoles remove constraints from previous generations, but resource balancing is always an issue. Unreal Engine 5 will reduce these demands with new features aimed at efficiency and flexibility.

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With higher-end specs like 7nm+ AMD SoCs with Zen 2 CPUs and Navi 2X GPUs, 16GB unified GDDR6 RAM, PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles represent massive leaps over the PS4 and Xbox One. The new machines are much more capable of hitting native 4K 60FPS (and sometimes 4K 120FPS) in specific games. But not all games are made equal, and dynamic resolution scaling is still necessary in many next-gen titles.

Luckily Epic has developers covered. Unreal Engine 5, which is being used on console games from The Coalition and Ninja Theory, will feature upgraded anti-aliasing that's specifically designed to work with its new Nanite virtualized geometry tools.

The new Anti-Aliasing Temporal Super Resolution feature allows scenes at near-4K resolution with the resource costs of 1080p.

"UE5's new anti-aliasing solution, temporal super resolution, keeps up with all this new geometric detail to create sharper, more stable images than before with quality approaching true native 4K at the cost of 1080p," Epic said in today's presentation.

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"Each scene in this instance has 1-2 million triangles, providing enough detail for the camera to roam with complete creative freedom."

More resources means more power for other parts of the game, including frame rates, which are the other half of the balancing act for console gaming.

Consoles like the Xbox Series X also leverage other powerful tools like Direct X 12's Variable Rate Shading, which can raise FPS by slightly lowering the resolution of faraway textures, offering a frame rate boost at the cost of imperceivable reductions in visual quality.

• Read Also: Here's Unreal Engine 5 running on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X