In previous posts, we mentioned the differences and advantages between Unity and UE.
Inventory of various creative programming tools | What to do if you have difficulty choosing?
Recently, the promotional video for UE5 has been all over social media.
So today, let’s talk a bit more about it.
On social media,
those who are relatively calm are usually technical artists and programmers.
Those who are overly excited are generally from an artistic background.
Some even crudely edited the following image👇.
Even more surprising, some posted on social media and later added, “Oh, it turns out it was fake.”
Hmmm, my reaction to seeing this image is that the person who edited it probably wrote a detailed strategy for the military recovery of Taiwan while picking their toes in high school.
The technology showcased in the UE5 video is stunning (even though it’s something that has been discussed in the computer graphics academic circle for a long time), and I believe Epic has the capability. However, considering their habit of releasing teaser videos, it will take at least three to four years before it’s available for users to download and use.
Moreover, by that time, you will need a PC that is no less powerful than a PlayStation 5, which will cost quite a bit. Let’s analyze this further.
The PS5 has good specifications, bolstered by Sony’s black technology. The machine is priced low (relative to the performance it offers) because of Sony’s production capacity and financial strength, which keeps component prices down.
For a similarly configured PC, it will be tough to get the price down to consumer levels within three to five years. And if it doesn’t come down, what would the price be? Refer to the Apple Mac Pro, which also has a super-fast SSD like the PS5.
Three to four years later, a PC with specs similar to the PS5, based on historical trends and my personal experience, along with the depreciation of the RMB (Trump is currently printing dollars wildly, which could lead to a global decline in purchasing power), will require a budget of around 40,000 to 50,000 RMB to smoothly achieve the effects showcased in the video.
Perhaps you think, why not just buy a PS5 to run UE5? That would be naive; game consoles can’t run engineering files. In the gaming industry, there’s something called a development kit, which is only available for purchase by game developers who have passed an application review, and it’s quite expensive.
Let me reiterate a point from my previous inventory article:
For realistic styles, using a keyboard, mouse, controller, and VR interaction, UE4 is very suitable. However, since Unity introduced HDRP, it has been catching up rapidly, and the gap is narrowing. Once you want to create other visual styles (buy corresponding plugins from the Unity asset store or manually program SRP), or add some Arduino Raspberry Pi DMX to the interaction (which can also be solved by buying a plugin, and even writing your own plugin is much easier than writing one for UE), as long as you are not a masochist, you will definitely choose Unity.
So, currently, Unity HDRP is still a good choice. Moreover, within a year or two, Unity will definitely catch up with the corresponding technology (as mentioned earlier, these are things that have been discussed in academia for a long time, and applying them is not a unique secret), so it’s hard to say which engine will be more suitable at that time.
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