Photorealism in Unreal Engine 4 in real-time: A sneak peek at next-gen games graphics

If you were wondering what kind of graphics we can expect from true next-gen games on the Xbox One, PS4, and PC, feast your eyes on the photorealistic visual wizardry of French artist Koola. Do not adjust your screen: All of the images and videos that you see in this story were generated in real-time using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), at decent frame rates (~30-60 fps) on a mid-range gaming PC.
Koola’s work, which was first shared on the Unreal Engine forums, almost entirely revolves around UE4′s enhanced lighting, including lightmass global illumination. There are undoubtedly some high-resolution (4K?) textures involved, too, and Koola admits that he uses some high poly counts for some models — but for the most part I think we’re mainly ogling some some delicious, precompiled light maps.

UE4 demo, by Koola. Click to zoom in.

Some high-poly UE4 trees, by Koola. Click to zoom in.

The videos are captured straight from Koola’s PC, which sports a Core i7-3770 CPU and GTX 670 GPU (i.e. a high-end gaming rig from last year). Most of the demos run in the 50-60 fps range, with some dipping down to 30. Except for the high poly counts, the demos aren’t actually all that strenuous — but it is important to note that these demos are primarily intended as architecture visualization (archviz). From the outset, Koola was trying to recreate scenes in UE4 that have the same characteristic photorealism of ray-traced art — and I think we can all agree that he’s succeeded.
Read our featured story: The future of real-time ray tracing
Whether Koola’s efforts can be directly transferred to gaming, I’m not sure. Games generally have many more (dynamic) objects on-screen, which would probably necessitate lower poly counts and smaller textures. Precompiled light maps aren’t so great when objects move around a scene, too (though UE4′s real-time lighting is pretty darn good).
In any case, I’m absolutely certain that we will see some absolutely beautiful games when developers finally start targeting new engines like UE4, and new hardware like the Xbox One, PS4, and modern PCs. Today, we are still mostly seeing games that target Xbox 360- and PS3-era software and hardware. After treading water for almost a decade, I think the next year or two will finally see a massive boost to game graphics.