Epic reveals how it's been working with Sony for years on Unreal Engine 5

Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney revealed that the company has worked with Sony over the last three or four years to make its new Nanite technology on the Unreal Engine 5 possible in an interview in Edge's latest issue.

In the interview, which is in E347, Sweeney says that discussions between Epic and Sony started several years ago: "It was three or four years ago at least when we started to talk with Mark Cerny about possibilities for the next generation." As Edge goes on to detail, the conversations between Epic and Sony centred around the growing realisation that storage architecture in game hardware was limiting what developers could do when it comes to making games.

A stand out feature included in the PS5 specs is the console's new storage system. With its tailor-made SSD, the PS5 is set to process game data 100 times faster than a PS4, and will speed up PS5 loading times for the next-generation of game worlds. Sweeney says the collaboration with Sony has been longer-running than with Microsoft, and the team at Epic were able to get very early access to Sony's next-gen hardware, which influenced the decision to debut the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo on the PS5.

"Sony really did a fantastic job of implementing a new platform around that realisation that storage could be revolutionised,” Sweeney says. “PlayStation 5 is built not only on a huge body of flash memory, but also a very high bandwidth and low latency framework for accessing it, and for getting it to wherever you need for any type of work.” Sweeney also described how the PS5 can render a texture "highly efficiently, fetching it from the high-speed SSD decompressed, into video memory in the exact place it’s needed."

Not long after the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo on the PS5, Epic detailed the purpose of Nanite. The new technology enables artists "to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see." In practise, this means that Nanite's virtualized geometry allows film-quality source art made up of hundreds of millions or billions of polygons to be imported directly into the Unreal Engine, which can then be streamed and scaled in real time.

You can read more about Epic's plans for the next-generation, the future of the Unreal Engine 5 and much more by picking up a copy of the latest issue of Edge. Or, to ensure that you never miss an issue, why not subscribe to Edge here or down below.

Heather Wald is the Evergreen Editor, Games at GamesRadar+. Her writing career began on a student-led magazine at Bath Spa University, where she earned a BA (Hons) in English literature. Heather landed her first role writing about tech and games for Stuff Magazine shortly after graduating with an MA in magazine journalism at Cardiff University. Now with almost seven years of experience working with GamesRadar+ on the features team, Heather helps to develop, maintain, and expand the evergreen features that exist on the site for games, as well as spearhead the Indie Spotlight series. You'll also see her contribute op-eds, interview-led features, and more. In her spare time, you'll likely find Heather tucking into RPGs and indie games, reading romance novels, and drinking lots of tea.