Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.
I'm not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before release of the engine, or whether you're implying that computer hardware won't be fast enough anytime soon.
In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There was a section in the demo where they had interactive gamepad controls so it appears it might have actually been running real-time on a PS5?
I never thought I would be saying this but storage might actually end up being a bigger issue than CPU/GPU performance. The new MS Flight Simulator has to stream the world over the internet because the entire map is 10 petabytes. In the UE5 video they said the demo scene was 13 or 16 billion triangles... I imagine that will take up a huge amount of disk space.
Modern AAA games are already 50-150 gigabytes each, and this is only going to grow as models and scenes become increasingly detailed.
Edit: finding holes in their demo - this may be a video compression artifact, but the big open scene at the end appeared to be of much lower quality. This is something current AMD GPUs can do where if you move around it dynamically lowers the resolution to prevent FPS from decreasing. Perhaps they also dynamically lower resolution in the big open areas? IDK how much of a benefit that would make, but you can never trust these marketing videos...
This is a demo. You can easily see that it's structured in a way that allows to easily mask loading of the new scenes and that there's not a lot of interaction going on - pretty much the only interactive thing they shown was dynamic illumination (which is something they were promising since early UE4 demos, and I believe that's what GP mostly meant) and particle system.
You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones) make tons of compromises that are neatly hidden on the video but that usually wouldn't be viable in context of a regular video game - at least without severely limiting your game design choices.
The Tomb Raider-esque parts where the character is jumping and climbing didn't look right. She's missing some kind of "weight" or something in her animation that makes it look like she's not really doing those things. Lara Croft's animations are much more convincing.
This isn't supposed to be a real game but a tech demo of engine capabilities. Expecting them to spend as much money on getting climbing animations as good as a AAA game is kind of crazy.
When it comes to animation the interesting stuff were the "automated" hand/foot placement animations like the hand on the door they mentioned.
I think the comment above was about the fact that U4 demos where also very realistic, and also real time. Still, how many U4 based games can you name that look nearly as good as those demos? I can name zero.
I remember the first UE4 thing I saw was Fortnite, which didn't seem that impressive...that might have just been the first UE4 game though, and not the first UE4 footage, I can't remember.
(Just a reminder, this was back when Fortnite was not a Battle Royale game, and nobody in the world knew about the it. That game was in development / early access for ages before it became the biggest thing in the world.)
Games built on Unreal 4 in the last couple of years look way better than that 2012 UE4 demo. The first few years of games on UE5 might not look like the UE5 demo today, but in a few years they will catch up.
