Graphics engine Unity has been showcasing its tech improvements through cinematic demos for several years now, and Enemies is its latest effort. The short clip shows an intimidating lady playing chess in a posh, art deco room that transforms into a Wayne Manor-style elevator. Many of the improvements centre on skin shaders and tension tech, helping to create more lifelike and believable faces.
There are raytraced reflections, too, and the demo is also using DLSS to reconstruct the image at 4K without any loss to detail. One other thing worth paying attention to is the hair: “For the protagonist’s highly realistic locks, the demo team and Unity’s research and development team collaborated on an all-new hair solution for authoring, importing, simulating, and rendering strand-based hair.”
As you’d probably expect, this is all running on a top-end PC, but Unity says that it’s prepared various other versions optimised for lower hardware targets, including consoles like the PlayStation 5. It’ll be on display all week in the Unity booth at GDC. Obviously don’t expect games to look like this for quite some time – this has been created to promote a graphics engine, after all – but it should give you a taste of where we’re headed.
[source unity.com]
Comments 24
With the ongoing chip shortage and sony and microsoft failing to meet demand cross-gen games will be the norm so keep your expectations low yet another year.
Between this an UE5, realistic graphics are going to get even more realistic and it's kinda crazy to think how far they'll go.
But also: 30 fps console gaming isn't going anywhere this gen (which I'm kinda ok with, tbh).
All I have to say is, wow!
@Voltan The problem is budgets. Creating all of these art assets is going to be extraordinarily expensive.
@get2sammyb the thing is aren't high quality assets created anyway. Those assets are then optimised into several lods. I think that removing of extra work of creating the lower quality assets was a big target for ue5.
Pretty mind blowing stuff.
@get2sammyb UE seems to be actually partially removing that barrier for smaller projects (with the metahuman creator and assets library and stuff) and I'm assuming Unity is aiming to do a similar thing. AAA projects have been creating them anyway and I don't think the cost will increase dramatically (but then again I know nothing about actual game budgets, so I could be wrong).
Anyway, this sure looks very nice
@Voltan You're absolutely spot on. The Quixel assets that can be imported to Unreal engine 5 look impressive and are feasible to ship in a game. Whether or not the hardware can run it how you expect it to look in-engine is another thing.
This is stunning, very very impressive!
Looks really good. Would be nice to play games that look this good, but to be honest I’m still impressed with PS4 graphics so I’m in no rush.
Reminded me of the intro to Tekken 1. Almost identical in quality.
Looks like they're finally figuring out teeth. I don't know what it is, but even in gorgeous games like HFW, teeth can look so garish and fake at times.
These tech demos of realistic graphics have been shown for years. But still only cut scenes can process this realism. We have yet to see a full game if this quality.
@Grimwood as always, the answer depends on what sort of game you're trying to make and with what sort of budget.
That is pretty freaking crazy.
“ 30 fps console gaming isn't going anywhere this gen ”
that’s really sad to hear , 30fps is becoming more and more unbearable by the day . 60 is just so noticeably better .
Looks pretty convincing until she starts speaking and then the whole illusion falls apart. It seems like it is really a huge challenge to actually make a human face that produces a realistic movement of face.
Used to hate the unity engine, it was a bit of a dog but the last ten years its came along way.
I remember when Wing Commander II was released, it was praised as being "a cinematic experience" and "interactive movie"... Well, the fact was if you had a color monitor and a PC able to run the game, you were on the cutting edge... Those were the best graphics you could get... "How much better it can be?"
There’s one quick fix solution to hair physics, I’m surprised in gaming it hasn’t been more taken to.
@Voltan I'd rather it not — I haven't played an original 30fps game since the year 2020 (Ghosts of Tsushima on PS4). At this point I can't go back, I think I would only buy a game if it had a 60fps option.
Looked okay but wasn't that impressive tbh...
That hair is the new strand-type game.
Unity has come a long way clearly.. but I'm not impressed until I see it on less than "top end PC". The Matrix demo was running on a $500 PS5 and that is impressive. Lets see what Unity can pull off on the same machine before I come away impressed.
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