 Hey everyone, before I get into this video, I want to remind you to enter our Xenoblake Chronicles Definitive Edition giveaway. All you got to do is drop a like, hit that subscribe button, comment down below. The comment is very important because that's one way I track everything. And then you're going to want to also hit that bell icon and set it to all notifications so you're notified of every stream, video, etc. That I upload helps the channel grow, helps me able to do bigger and grander giveaways as time goes on. Alright, today we're going to talk about something that seems almost counterintuitive to a degree because we just got the unveiling in this past week of Unreal Engine 5. And it was shown on the PlayStation 5. It has since been confirmed to run on a whole slew of platforms. Tim Sweeney came out on Eurogamer and said that it runs on all platforms that Unreal Engine 4 currently runs on. So that includes PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, Android, PC, Mac OS, Switch, blah blah blah. Everything under the sun that Unreal Engine 4 runs on now. Unreal Engine 5 will run on as well. And that they do plan to move Fortnite over to it at some point in 2021. They are releasing an early build for developers to use in early 2021 with the full engine releasing later by the end of the year, basically next year. So no developer right now is currently working with this tech beyond Epic, the creators of it. So it feels weird to read the headline of this video and go, man, how is a next-generation engine, even if it can run on all this old hardware, going to help Switch maintain ports in 2021, 2022, 2023, when Unreal Engine 5 is being widely used. And the big reason is because of the technology inside Unreal Engine 5, I firmly believe actually benefits the Switch. Now, it clearly benefits other platforms as well. But what they're doing with this tech actually takes modern methods and makes them easier. And in making them easier, it should make porting easier. Now, this isn't to say every single game made with Unreal Engine 5 is magically going to be able to be ported to Switch or to your cell phone, device or whatever. Like that's not necessarily going to be the case. There are plenty of Unreal Engine 4 games right now that are not currently ported to Switch. The one I could think of off the top of my head, I believe is Kingdom Hearts 3. I'm not saying that Kingdom Hearts 3 can't run on Switch. I'm not saying that they haven't tried to make it run on Switch, but it's just not currently on Switch. So there are some decisions that are going to go into third-party companies on whether they want to support a Switch version, even though I do think the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be supported for a long time. And that's going to allow Switch to potentially get ports as well. But this is the thing. The technology being used in this is quite interesting. And I want to give credit to Dr.81. I'll put a link to his video down in the description, because he pointed this out about five or six days ago. And I only recently got around to it today to check out the video. And I want to talk about some of it, but I want to go a little bit deeper. So first off, what we have here is a look at two different technologies that this introduces, because Unreal Engine 5 takes advantage of a whole bunch of current technologies that Unreal Engine 4 also takes advantage of. I kind of think this might have been built on top of Unreal Engine 4, to be completely honest, because they said the transition to next-gen development is actually going to be super smooth, moving from Unreal Engine 4 into Unreal Engine 5. Like, you can literally start next-gen development in Unreal Engine 4 and port it into 5, no problem. Again, this makes me feel like they started with Unreal Engine 4 and then built new technologies around it. But one of it is Nanite Virtualized Micro-Polygon Geometry. So this is a technology that's used to draw the pixels and the triangles and create some of the effects that you see with the detail in the environments. And their exact quote on what this means is, it frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite Virtualized Geometry means that film quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine. Anything from ZBrush Sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data, and it just works. Nanite Geometry is streamed and scaled in real time, so there's no more polygon count budgets. Polygon memory budgets or draw count budgets. There is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs, and there is no loss in quality. Now, again, this is obviously, when we saw it on PlayStation 5, we're seeing it at close to its peak performance level. And there's rumors that that demo alone was like 100 gigabytes in size or something like that. So not necessarily a realistic implementation, more so an idealistic one. But the idea here is that you can take your textures, take your real life photos and real life stuff, import it into the engine, and the engine will not put the work for that into these different budgets they've had to use in the past, which have led to really low quality assets and the inability to use movie quality assets. Now, this is obviously on PlayStation 5, when you're applying this to a Nintendo Switch, or really any lower end hardware, the idea behind doing so is that this actually doesn't just benefit new age hardware. This benefits older hardware too, because the prior method for creating this had a lot more steps and needed a lot more memory and bandwidth from various different aspects of the hardware. And now a lot of that's going to be freed up because the engine renders it differently. And this doesn't mean you're going to suddenly get movie quality assets coming from PlayStation 5, ported into Switch. Clearly there's going to be some degradation there. They're going to have to say, you know, take an Unreal Engine game, Unreal Engine 5, you want PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X, and if you're bringing it down to Switch, it's not going to look exactly the same. There's going to be, you know, they talked about the one scene where there are billions of triangles and able to compress it down to 20 million. The triangles are going to be compressed even more on Switch. But I think the idea is they're dynamically compressed in such a way that you can decide how much detail you really want to show. So on Switch, you're not going to get the 20 million, you know, triangles, you know, put out there, but you could get, you know, a million, two million triangles put out there. They'd just be bigger triangles. So then the textures would still be the same source material, but it would be rendered out to you in a different way that takes up less processing and is able to therefore be down ported to Switch in a much easier method. This is going to enable Unreal Engine 5 games to potentially come from PlayStation 5, Exo Series X and PC, and more seamlessly come out on Nintendo Switch. Now we're talking lower resolutions. We're talking 1080p, 720p. The PlayStation 5 demo was running at 1440p. So we're not talking about the 4K stuff here. We're just saying that the same asset can be used, but you can just reduce the amount of triangles being drawn. So you can end up with an image that ends up looking nice, but not quite as nice, obviously, as it would on better hardware, but makes it easier to downgrade. This is all dynamically done. The developer doesn't have to do a lot of work to make this happen. That's the whole point of the Nanite virtualized micro-polygon geometry, is that it frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see, because they don't have to spend all this time individually mapping things and drawing things and sticking it in different parts of the memory and getting draw count budgets and all that. They don't have to focus on any of that, because the engine will just do it for them when they import the assets in, and obviously they can control the level of detail from there. And the same is true with another technology, because they really introduced two major technologies in this, because the Nanite virtualized micro-polygon geometry is used not just for the backgrounds, it was used for the bats that were flying and everything else. It's a whole geometry thing that affects everything in the game, is Lumen. And Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffused interflexion with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in a huge detailed environment, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen. For example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for light map bakes to finish and author light map UVs. A huge time saving when an artist can move a light inside Unreal Engine Editor, and the lighting looks the same as when the game is run on the console. So the idea here is that Lumen is kind of the bouncing of the light. It sounds a little bit like ray tracing in a way, but without actually ray tracing. So this is just its own thing baked into it that can run on anything. And the idea is that you can bounce light around. Now this might seem like, oh, this has to be on some super powerful hardware, but what they're actually saying here is you don't need to wait for light map bakes to finish and author the light map UVs. That means that you don't have to wait for what you typically would have to wait for in hardware in Unreal Engine 4, which gives a time saving. So actually it makes producing light much easier and getting more natural light. And you can obviously control various aspects of this, how intense you want it to be, all that. And I'm not saying that the lighting is going to be exactly the same if you run it on Switch as it went on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 Series X. Again, we're talking about hardware that is significantly less. Games are not going to look exactly the same, but it sounds like to me, between the Nanite virtualized thing and the lighting handled with Lumen, that it's actually easier to run high fidelity games on lower hardware at lower specs with minimal work being done. And this actually goes to credit Epic. They have actually been touting for a long time the scalability of Unreal Engine 4, how scalable future engines are going to have to be to be able to support a wide range of devices. And the scalability wasn't just about making Fortnite playable and everything, it's about taking any game made at the highest asset qualities and able to reduce them to be able to run on any type of hardware that is supported, since Switch will be supported with Unreal Engine 5, and we're talking the original Switch. We're not even focusing on a Pro or a Switch 2, which clearly, if those exist, would end up with support as well. We're just talking about the ability to take a game that is made for something way more powerful and be able to reduce the assets dynamically to a point that they can run on Switch with minimal effort. And I think that's where this technology really comes into play, because the Nanite virtualized micro-polycom geometry, while it frees up all this stuff and it does enable things, obviously, with the better hardware you have, the more you'll be able to do, you don't need this to create what we saw there. We've seen demos and other engines running that look just as pretty as we saw that Unreal Engine 5 demo. In fact, some people weren't even impressed by it because they think some of the current games out there, like Red Dead Redemption 2 and others, looked better. But the thing is, it's not necessarily about that. It's about the freeing up of resources and how it's being done. Realistically, games aren't going to be drawing in 8K assets and chopping them down into 1440p. They're going to be using 4K or under assets and chopping them down and dynamically rebuilding them. But the idea here is that you could take those assets, take a lot of the work out of the developer's hands and the artist's hands to make them run and actually have it all dynamically drawn and then reduced depending on the hardware and you can obviously mess with the settings. I think this is excellent technology for Switch. And again, credit to Dr.81 for pointing this one out. Now, as you know others out there that have covered a little bit of this, like Super Metal Dave 64, this doesn't mean the Switch is going to get every single Unreal Engine game under the sun, but it does open the potential to get Unreal Engine 5 games ported from PlayStation 5 to PlayStation 4 to Switch. I think that this does open the door to allowing certain third-party games that choose to develop an Unreal Engine to still support Nintendo Switch. This is big for some games, not so much for others. You have to wonder sometimes what's really going on behind closed doors and what developers really think of Switch. Now Switch is an undeniably popular platform. You would think everyone wants their games on it, but we know that hasn't been the case. And while we've seen some Unreal Engine 4 projects, including some by Nintendo, we haven't seen all of them. So there's still going to be some give and take here. And I'm not going to end up promise you the world here that we're going to get all the Unreal Engine 5 games also coming to Switch. But I do think that it's a lot more realistic than people realize. And the technology created benefits older hardware almost more than it benefits newer hardware. Obviously it benefits newer hardware because you can do even more with faster and better hardware. But I think this really benefits older hardware. This is going to benefit the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, the Switch, the Android and iOS, and older PC and Mac. It's going to benefit them the most because you'll be able to see higher quality assets done at the same cost as the prior assets we were seeing in Unreal Engine 4 that were lower quality. So I think that this is going to be ultimately a great thing for Nintendo Switch owners. And obviously if Nintendo starts developing games in Unreal Engine 5 exclusively for Switch or whatever, those games are going to look even better because we've already seen Yoshi's Craft of World in Unreal Engine 4. So if Nintendo starts to dabble more into that and adopting that as an engine that they're going to use company-wide because clearly they're dabbling in it, I think that is a beautiful thing for Nintendo. And Unreal Engine is obviously one of the best video game engines in the world. There's a reason that a lot of developers and a lot of AAA games are made with it because it is so versatile. And yeah, the company behind it is really, really nice about it. Unreal Engine 4 is free for a lot of people right now. Most developers, Unreal Engine 5 is free for developers up to the first million dollars in gross sales. I don't know if that's profits or whatever. But either way, they're literally letting you use it to a point that you have to be really successful. And then if you're really successful, then they'll take their cut. So yeah, I'm pretty stoked about this. I want to know your guys' thoughts on Unreal Engine 5. Were you impressed with the demo? Do you think that this is going to open the door to more ports of next-gen games coming to Switch? You know, again, not everything, but I think some games are going to be able to come over. And I'm actually kind of curious to see how this works. Again, we're only going to have to worry about it for a couple of years because, again, this engine doesn't even launch to the end of 2021. So we're not going to see games from it really until 2022, besides Fortnite. And then from that point forward, Switch probably only has a year or two left on the market before we're looking at next-gen Switch. So we'll only have to worry about it for a small period of time. But it is going to be nice to know that Switch isn't going to be left behind, per se, just because these new next-gen engines are coming out. In fact, because of what they're learning about technology, they're able to make these engines almost more efficient. This sounds, to me, like a souped-up Unreal Engine 4 that does everything Unreal Engine 4 did, but does it better and more efficiently. And that can't do anything but benefit every platform that it's on. Anyway, folks, I am Nathan Robeljens from Nintendo Prime. I want to thank you all for tuning in. It's been wonderful. I hope you enjoyed this video. I love talking next-gen. I love talking the ability for next-gen to come to Switch. And this is just one engine we're talking about. I mean, there's a lot more going on out there. There's some interesting stuff with EA and Nintendo some nice theories we could talk about with why EA might be potentially ramping up close to full support for Switch moving forward, despite next-gen platforms coming. There's going to be an interesting discussion on that coming up later this week. But for now, this is what I leave you with today. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you caught my Q&A stream earlier. If not, whatever. You know what? You're here now. So I'll catch you in the next video.