PS5 super-fast loading led Epic to rewrite parts of Unreal Engine 5

PS5 loads so fast that Epic Games rewrote parts of Unreal Engine 5 to make the most of it.

The first public footage of Unreal Engine 5 in action was running on PS5 hardware: the Lumen in the Land of Nanite demo showed a lone explorer in some exquisitely rendered ruins. This wasn’t just a convenient opportunity for cross-promotion, as Epic Games vice president of engineering explained in an interview with VG247: the possibilities presented by PS5 have made Epic push the engine even further than it originally intended.

“The PlayStation 5 provides a huge leap in both computing and graphics performance, but its storage architecture is also truly special,” Penwarden said. “The ability to stream in content at extreme speeds enables developers to create denser and more detailed environments, changing how we think about streaming content. It’s so impactful that we’ve rewritten our core I/O subsystems for Unreal Engine with the PlayStation 5 in mind.”

One of the first demonstrations of PS5 hardware Sony gave was showing off how much faster Spider-Man PS4 could load. That was taking a game made for older hardware on an older engine. You can imagine how much more impressive the results could be for a game that’s built for PS5, running on an engine that was specifically written to take advantage of the console’s capabilities.

You can see even more possibilities for PS5 and Unreal Engine 5 with our roundup of developer reactions to the demo.

Sony plans to show off some upcoming PS5 games soon, though its big games event set for this week was delayed to “allow more important voices to be heard”.