Unreal Engine 5 brings two key features which stand to radically improve the realism of both 3D geometry and lighting. While the features aren’t yet fully optimized for VR, early developer experiments are showing impressive results.

Unreal Engine 5 launched earlier this year, but unfortunately its two new key features—Lumen for global illumination lighting and Nanite for micro-geometry—weren’t supported for VR out of the gate.

However, Epic has been working on subsequent versions of of Unreal Engine 5, and though they aren’t ready for a full release yet, preview builds of Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 show that Lumen & Nanite have gained initial support for VR.

And while there’s still likely progress to be made to fully optimize the features for the level of performance required by VR headsets, developer have begun experimenting with Lumen & Nanite in VR and the results are already quite striking.

One such example comes from Twitter users Hiroyan which dropped themselves into a cave full of richly detailed objects and a flashlight to light up the space.

While many Lumen demos have focused on showing crazy glowing balls and highly reflective surfaces (as a clear example of what Lumen actually does), it’s actually this much more subtle use of the technologies that—to me, anyway—looks the most convincing from a realism standpoint.

The thing that really makes this scene stand out is the interplay between the highly detailed geometry and the lighting. VR really benefits from more detailed geometry not only because the stereoscopic view makes it readily apparent when small geometric details are actually faked (using tricks like normal mapping), but also because it’s so much easier and more common to get really close to objects when you’re playing in VR. Not only can you pick stuff up and hold it right up to your face, you can lean your head infinitely close to any surface.

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Thanks to Nanite—which essentially functions like a continuous LOD system that draws detail from the original ‘master’ 3D model—the tiny surface details on the rocks and wood really stand out, especially because they’re real in terms of stereoscopic depth.

And thanks to that, the Lumen lighting system properly catches all of those small surface details and shines on them in a very convincing way that also subtly lights up the rest of the scene without pushing reflections to unrealistic levels simply for demonstration purposes.

“It’s hard to convey through screenshots, but it’s truly amazing when you’re able to get super close up to objects and they have micro detail you can see with your own eyes,” writes Hiroyan.

Images courtesy Hiroyan

While it will be awesome when this level of detail is possible on a basic VR ready PC, that might not happen for some time. Hiroyan says this demonstration was running on Nvidia’s RTX 3090, one of the highest-end GPUs the company makes.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
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    I simply don’t care about these kinds of stories anymore. Every time in the past it’s been meaningless. A screenshot is worthless. Look at screenshots of many VR games from 2016, a lot of them look better than VR games today. Why? Because they used deferred rendering which in theory was great, good fps and amazing lighting. In practice they’re so blurry you can barely see anything. A million things could go wrong from performance to 3D depth to failures of nanite and lumen to work properly in stereo to artifacting to again blurriness. Maybe it’s different this time but I and everyone else shouldn’t believe it until we actually see it in headset.

    • kontis

      Sure, but this isn’t some behind the doors secret stuff. Anyone can download UE5.

      The main reason I doubt we will see anything with decent budget using Lumen is that PS5 is not powerful enough for a PSVR2 game with Lumen at 60+ FPS in stereo.
      And decent budget game can’t be made just for high end PCVR audience…

      Nanite is a different story. Lower requirements and may even work with Forward shading (MSAA) in the future.

      • Cl

        Why can’t they have different settings for different powered pcs or devices… many games do that

        • Some things aren’t as simple as just flipping a toggle unfortunately. In the case of forward vs deferred rendering, it fundamentally changes how you implement shaders and post-processing effects.
          But if Epic have figured out an anti-aliasing technique that works better than TAA in VR, maybe we’d see some games use this tech on PS5 and PC.
          Standalone headsets though, because of the processing limitations are basically stuck with forward rendering, and given most VR games try to target as many platforms as possible, it probably won’t be a common occurrence.

      • ApocalypseShadow

        I disagree. You speak as if PS5 is built like most modern PCs. It’s not. The sound chip isn’t, the haptics isn’t, the SSD built in isn’t a standard PC thing as it throws gigs of compressed and uncompressed data per second. How the CPU can help the GPU and the system peaking at 10.28 teraflops, PS5 doesn’t have the same worries of PC which is why the games are keeping up with most PC setups. And there’s nothing comparable in price to performance on PC. A $399 PS5 is unmatched. You have to spend more on PC to get same or better performance.

        When UE5 was premiered, it wasn’t a PC Epic went with like they usually do. It was PS5. And that wasn’t even an optimized tech demonstration. Then, it displayed the Matrix Demo which ran at 1440p and between 30-50fps with a huge open world. We know UE5 can run on simple hardware like Quest 2 or Nintendo Switch. But PS5 is many, many, many times more powerful than those things. Not only do I think we’ll see Ray Tracing in some PS VR 2 games. You’ll see eventually lumen and nanite running in some form. Possibly at 1080p at 60fps or more. Which is fine. Not on huge, open world games. But something like how Red Matter 2 is made on Quest 2 but turned up to 100.

        Optimization is still early as lumen and nanite didn’t even work in VR. Now, it’s working. With more tweaking coming. PC will definitely get games with it eventually. But PS VR 2 will get it in some form through customization. Right now, Epic has already stated that UE5 games are being made on PS VR 2. It’s only the beginning of what they are and what’s next for Sony’s headset in the next 5 to 10 years.

        • ApocalypseShadow

          And, just to add to my comment, I didn’t even mention that PS VR 2 has eye tracking and foveated rendering that reduces the need to render an entire scene at full resolution. Just what you are looking at. Something again, that has no comparison on PC.

          I remember when gamers said only a PC can do VR. But base PS4 was doing VR. Even Quest and Pico are doing VR. Told you need a high end PC to do ray tracing. Yet, PS5 does ray tracing in games like Spider-Man. I believe that PS VR 2 will do lumen and nanite as well. Not right away. But it will in small doses. And we’ll just look back on history and laugh. PS5 and PS VR 2 just aren’t comparable one to one to a PC. Not to say it’s better. But it’s not exactly the same either

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          (much) TL;DR: Lumen uses Nanite scene complexity reduction and RT hardware, so using less complex scenes with Lumen will most likely not provide a similar significant performance/FPS boost as with complex scenes, meaning trying to target PSVR 2, you will run into similar hardware limits for frame rate/resolution.

          Yes, UE5 games can run on simpler hardware, but that doesn’t mean that this hardware runs the same features, only using them less. It often means completely dropping features like post processing or dynamic lighting. Mobile GPUs can do a lot of the same things as desktop GPUs, but many of them not fast enough to be usable in typical games.

          You could use realtime software raytracing on a Quest at usable frame rates, but you probably have to reduce your scene to a few very tiny cubes. Red Matter 2 is somewhat like that, a game that is not only optimized, but especially designed for the limited Adreno GPU, compensating for a lack of power by carefully creating level geometry to guarantee never exceeding the limits. But this type of hand tuning is pretty much the opposite of what Nanite and Lumen are intended for: removing the need to heavily optimize every detail from the developers, instead allowing them to throw huge scenes and hires models at the engine, which will optimize them on the fly.

          It should of course be technically possible to use Lumen with PSVR 2 games, the question is if this requires so many design constraints that developers will prefer to use the resources elsewhere. Current PS5 games using the hardware RT mostly run only at 30fps, so trying the same in VR with a two-eyes 4K resolution at 60Hz would require limiting scene complexity a lot. AFAIK Lumen is technically a form of lowres raytracing based on special Lumen-LoD models generated by Nanite with massively reduced complexity plus another low complexity scene model, and uses RT cores if present. The current demos using Lumen @30Hz are already taxing the limited PS5 RT hardware, and this is something that cannot be easily optimized away.

          This also means that less complex scenes will not necessarily benefit from Lumen, allowing them to run fast enough for VR, as the basic trick of Lumen plus Nanite is to reduce the world to a significantly less complex scene in the first place, something that may not even be possible with an already simple scene.

          Basically Nanite and Lumen don’t speed up the rendering directly, they only reduce massively complex scenes to a level where the hardware can render them at a similar speed as low complexity scenes. Rendering faster would still require more powerful hardware or significantly lower resolution. Yes, thanks to the added rendering power and RT hardware you could probably use Nanite, Lumen and raytracing on PSVR 2 to make titles like Tetris Effect even more impressive. But it might require significant design restrictions that simply won’t work for the majority of titles, so the assumption that Lumen will be mostly ignored on PSVR 2 makes sense.

          And technically the PS5 is mostly just like a PC, though not like the current average PC. The SSD is a standard PCIe 4 SSD, the extra benefit/speed comes from the fast GDDR6 memory shared between CPU and GPU, and an auxiliary unit in the SSD path that adds on-the-fly decompression. The shared memory is available on any APU, though I doubt that anybody offers those in PCs with expensive GDDR6, as APUs usually target the low cost market. The decompression chip is of course proprietary, but Microsoft recently announced DirectStorage 1.1, adapted from Xbox Series X and now introducing support for GDeflate, a variant of the Deflate format from Nvidia that uses a DX12 GPU for lossless stream decompression and is also supported by Intel and AMD.

          Combined with DirectStorage this will now allow to circumvent the main memory previously still needed for texture decompression, providing a very similar solution/performance to the PS5 SSD-to-fast-GPU-RAM with inline decompression. The main difference is that the PS5 had it since launch for a fraction of the price, and games already make use of it, as it is always present, giving PS5 software a multi-year head start. But most of the PS5/Xbox Series X is just PC technology, because this makes them cheaper to produce.

          The PS5 is a well balanced and optimized machine, but there isn’t much that would boost the performance of the same CPU/GPU beyond what they could do in an optimized PC. The GPU is about as fast as a RTX 2070 Super, and PSVR 2 games get a comparable performance plus up to 45% (but less on average) extra on top of FFR thanks to ETFR. A 2070 Super cannot run most current pancake games in native 4K at 60Hz, you’d need something like DLSS 2 for decent frame rates, and that is without raytracing or overly complex geometry that would benefit from Nanite/Lumen.

          • ApocalypseShadow

            Sony’s SSD wasn’t a standard on PC. That was well known when the system was launched. It took PC time to catch up but even then, there are no games on PC that take advantage of SSD game development. Because games are programmed for the lowest common denominator. Mostly HDD. Games are made the old fashioned way. No developer on PC pushes graphics cards because there’s no standard. That’s why it’s always resolution and frame rates. Basic stuff.

            Almost all games on PC are programmed without eye tracking because almost all PC headsets don’t have it. Most gamers on PC don’t have the same graphics card. So, even if one has great sound, most games don’t take advantage of it. There’s also no haptic standard.

            The thing about PS5 and PS VR 2 is that everything is built into one device. Every PS5 gamer who buys a PS VR 2 has the same standard power, sound, haptics, controllers and eye tracking. Sure. Some of these developers will not use those features to make parity games across platforms. Indie developers don’t have the funds for deep research and development of bigger games. But other developers will push Sony’s headset to the next level. Not having to worry about PC configurations or mobile. The exclusives. Which we know Sony will have.

            PS4 punched above it’s own weight making VR possible. PS4 Pro never really had games taking advantage of it because Sony wanted parity and not leave base gamers behind. PS VR 2 won’t be held back by base PS4 or PS4 Pro. Elevating the need to program for the lowest common denominator. There’s only one device. I didn’t mention 4K lumen and nanite games. I mentioned 1080P. Possibly 1440P games. Because I don’t think 4K 60-120 fps games will be possible without limitations in graphics complexity and objects onscreen. PS5 is powerful but not magic.

            But we’ll see soon enough. Sony’s advantage is that it’s all built in. And why PC gamers want the headset hacked to work on PC so that they can experiment. But it still won’t matter for PC if most gamers don’t have the headset or the hardware to take advantage of those built in features. And buying the headset for PC would actually be detrimental to what Sony is trying to accomplish and make sales with on console.

            But I know Ray traced games will be there. UE5 games will be there. 120fps games will be there. Eye tracked games will be there. And somewhere down the line, there will be lumen and nanite games. I’ll start my stopwatch. Then we’ll come back and revisit this article.

      • Cless

        To be honest, as a gamedev and a selfappointed graphics whore, I couldn’t care less about VR games having lumen. Nanite on the other side, its going to make a MASSIVE difference.

        • ViRGiN

          Sounds like a wet dream for those who want to run 50000 polygons for a model of cup of tea.

          Polycount was never really an issue for VR games.

          • Cless

            hahahaha
            Fair enough, I do want 50k tri cups of tea if I’m allowed lol
            The problem with nanite becomes the weight of the files. But specifically for terrain, it would be amazing and allow us to stop using depth maps in most cases when we can use geo instead.

            But on a more serious note, no, you are way off on that last statement. We are very limited polycount wise for VR. Specially in anything that will be needing to have any sort of animation.

            This becomes 10 times worse on portable devices that have the XR2, usually the polycounts on those tend to be similar to what the Switch moves, which is already ridiculously limiting. Budgets are often lower than what PS3/xbox360 games used, so… yeah… :/

          • ViRGiN

            I wonder what kind of next-next-gen-gen thing are you working on to consider existing “limits” on PCVR as limits. The thread is about UE5, not for XR2 devices.

          • Cless

            I’m on current gen, obviously, on a 4090 and a 13900k to be able to work comfortably, since you asked.

            … You do know that you can put UE5 projects into XR2 devices right? UE its just an engine, it can be used in VR devices. Just because the XR2 doesn’t have enough juice to use the cool features doesn’t mean its somehow not compatible.

            XR2 is a CPU that is common in VR devices, so why the hell wouldn’t it be relevant when we are talking about polygon budgets and their limits?

            And yeah since VR is a hog on the GPU, we already have to cut corners to about last gen graphics. Then on top of that add that the average GPU until last year was between a gtx1060 and a rtx2060, then yeah, the main target will be that one except for AA or higher budget studios (or if you have a crazy talented studio).

          • ViRGiN

            I can ask other 3D artists, and they can all agree higher poly count does not make better games.
            And gameplay is the biggest issue, not graphics.

            If you can’t deal with what’s available – you aren’t cut for it. VR absolutetly does not need “better graphics” now – that’s something desired WHEN proper games are released.

            You kinda sound like these pimax worshippers who strongly believe that 200 fov and 5k per eye will make VR great. No, it won’t.

          • Cless

            You are just changing subjects now?
            We are not talking about that, that is completely unrelated to what we are discussing.

            I don’t mind working with some limitations, that always comes with the job, but you are flat out wrong, VR does need more and better graphics, even more than pancake games do, specially since some of the usual tricks we do to fake out effects become easy more expensive to do in VR because of the two screens and massive resolutions.

            VR is so power limited that it’s affecting game play, specially in mobile VR. Many limiting design decisions must be taken just to keep the FPS from tanking.

          • ViRGiN

            Bla bla bla. Yeah and VR also needs all-day battery life and so on.
            We’ve went from GTX970 as bare minimum to todays cards.

            Developers never used that extra power that came over the years. Many reasons. Graphic cards are barely getting cheaper, and there are bigger problems in the world than better graphics. Salaries aren’t really rising up, but cost of living do. You are not going to have big player base getting better cards. Deal with it. Make better games with existing limits. If you can’t, you are doing it wrong.

          • Cless

            Developers never used that extra power that came over the years.

            Untrue, many games use more than a goddamn gtx970.

            Graphic cards are barely getting cheaper, and there are bigger problems in the world than better graphics.

            Another lie, they actually are getting cheaper if you adjust for power and count by fps generated per $.

            Salaries aren’t really rising up, but cost of living do.

            Irrelevant.

            You are not going to have big player base getting better cards.

            We are and we have, progress hasn’t stopped and now that 3000 series are getting lower prices and the second hand market is getting flooded by cards they are getting crazy cheap.

            Make better games with existing limits. If you can’t, you are doing it wrong.

            This is literally baked into the position of any game maker, you have to deal with limits. That doesn’t mean we can’t complain about it, or hope for better hardware to come along to lift some of our limitations.

          • ViRGiN

            > Irrelevant.
            Relevant, especially for VR.

            > Another lie, they actually are getting cheaper if you adjust for power and count by fps generated per $.
            And those who buy those, are not interested in VR. So once again, more power for VR is irrelevant as it only narrows your client base. If you can’t run on 1060, your game has no place on the marketplace.

            > We are and we have, progress hasn’t stopped and now that 3000 series are getting lower prices and the second hand market is getting flooded by cards they are getting crazy cheap.
            So you believe there is a big userbase interested in VR that had to jump several generations of GPU to get decent VR performance?

            > Untrue, many games use more than a goddamn gtx970.
            And those that do, looks nowhere near as good as 10 year Far Cry 3.

            I’ve heard your arguments all over the years. It’s always the next generation that magically solves main VR problem – quality of the games.

          • Cless

            Jesus Christ man, you can be hard to discuss with.
            You keep putting words in my mouth and fighting an imaginary strawman you keep projecting on me.

            1.Please prove to me where is the relation between rising cost of living and decreased VR sales. There is none, since VR sales keep increasing linearly month to month on average.

            2.Statistically a % of those people buying a new GPU already own VR, and another smaller % will be buying it and getting into VR. Go to reddit to literally any PCVR subreddit and be annoyed by the fuckload of ammount of new daily posts of “I don’t know how to use google! I just bought X gpu, will it work for VRRRRRR??? D: ”
            Also, for fucks sake, upgrade your shitty PCVR statistics, that was true like in 2019. 60% of the GPU gaming market uses better GPUs than a 1060 nowadays, and this is before the big bump expected in 2023. That’s why the average, like I said before, is close to an RTX 2060.

            3.No I don’t believe there is a big hidden userbase interested in VR, and never said so. My point is showing to you how year over year, the average gaming computer keeps getting better and there are no signs of slowing down. The main point of this, showing to you that there is about to be a big bump thanks to all the people that haven’t upgraded the last two years because of the prices being over MSRP.
            The fact this went over your head and you went with your crazy balls theory of “You believe there is a big userbase intersted in VR that had to jump several generations of GPU to get decent VR performance?” is perplexing.

            4.This is so frustrating. Literally what I’ve been telling you a couple messages ago, VR has HIGH performance costs, games are going to look about one gen older, which limits what we can do compared with current hardware for current gen. Just by being in VR will drag down graphics about 1 gen, 2 if they are in mobile VR, jeez.

          • ViRGiN

            oh, and is your quest pro arriving today?

          • Cless

            Nah, I’m salty about it. I’m knee deep styudying for my N2 japanese exam plus switching VISA, to top it off, I’m going back home for Christmas, so I won’t be touching one until February 2023 or something like that.
            You tell me how yours feels when you get it though! I vaguely remember you telling me you got one, but it might have been someone else here!

  • kontis

    Important to note is that Lumen will never work in forward rendering, so no MSAA.
    But TSR is better than the old TAA people hated, so we will se how it goes.

    Nanite will be common in VR games (also on PS5 and maybe even on standalone mobile in a few years), but not Lumen.

    • ViRGiN

      What VR games? PCVR development is completly halted.

      • Anonymous

        While I too agree PCVR isn’t the mainstream way to go forward to make VR successful as a whole, it will always have a place in the market (this is excluding custom made business solutions). I love the Quest but at times I still crave for the version with better graphics on PC, and also for more varied VRChat avatars.

        Not to mention that most apps on Quest must go through App Lab first which frankly is very hard to browse snd get noticed. Not every dev readily enjoys the profits of the Quest Store and many never get the proper attention to fund for improvements and promotion on App Lab.

        And of course there is also NSFW related games which you will never find in the Quest ecosystem (at least not intuitively for the less-informed mainstream user)

      • kool

        The pcvr scene is kinda lawless right now with modders ruling the turfs. Sony will come in and gentrify next year and pcvr will actually take off proper. A great deal of quest use is to play modded PC games so there’s money on to be made and the only a big player that sees this is Sony.

        • ViRGiN

          No, always has been.
          VorpX existed before there were even consumer VR headsets. Nothing has changed in that regard. Just now stuff is getting more often done on per title basis.
          Those are still majorly 3D TV games with headtracking enabled and 6DOF room scale hack, paired with xbox controller.
          The only reason why those are “popular” is because native PCVR sucks, as simple as that. Or shall we deep dive into “but alyx, flight simulator, boneworks”?

          in no alternative universe “modded games” are anywhere near a solely good news. Most people would play the real VR thing instea of these hacks, if they had the choice. Mods are good, cause PCVR is bad. It literally “saves” the platform, and rather in context of extending life support. This era just barely kicked off anyway. 2 years ago you had pretty much nothing. GTA 5 VR did not change a tiny bit of adoption on PCVR, and it’s a game that will virtually rule the world once done, likely on PSVR2 in the future, and likely GTA SA will.

          “modded games” were a thing on standalone android headsets even before consumer vr headsets. They took android games and rendered them in 3D, often adding headtracking and even 6DOF.

          • kool

            Yeah, its a patchwork of mods and no PC dev has done any favors for VR lately. It’ll take a boost from sony to get the ball rolling but I wonder who else cares because a lot of ips could have been ported already.

          • Tommy

            The mods coming out now from the likes of Praydog and Team Beef are outstanding and nothing like Vorpix. They are not 6dof with controller anymore and once the VR Injector mod is released, you are going to see just about all of the UE4 and 5 games get full treatment. I’m talking 1st person 6dof with motion control support and detached hands and weapons/items.
            There are those that don’t want PCVR to succeed so they will try and persuade everyone these mods are hack jobs when the truth is they are excellent VR games.

          • brandon9271

            I think these mods may be a game changer. Devs will notice that people are buying their non VR games to play in VR. Hopefully this will nudge them into adding native VR

          • ViRGiN

            buying what games and in what number?
            PCVR people playing modded games are even MUCH, MUCH lower number than a single quest title.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Looking at how much money the Quest store is still taking in, I highly doubt that the larger part of Quest users is using it for PCVR, most people I know bought the Quest because they didn’t have the PC for PCVR, and they are very happy with tgeir Quest playing native games.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            We know how many Quest owners are using their Quest 2 for PCVR with Steam on a monthly basis, around 1.2mn. The last estimates we heard for Quest 2 sales were 15mn, so at least 8% of all Quest 2 ever sold would be still in use with PCVR. What percentage of active Quest 2 users this represents depends on user retention, but doing the math for 75%, 50% and 25% user retention brings the usage of Quest 2 for PCVR to 11%, 16% or 32% respectively.

            Actually a little bit higher thanks to users that play PCVR titles they bought on the Oculus Store instead of Steam. Still not the larger part, but kool never claimed that anyway, instead using the description a great deal of Quest use, which completely depends on perspective and the definition of “great”.

          • kool

            The quest store isn’t really taking in a lot 1.5 bill is a $100 per headset so I’d imagine people are doing other things with the headset.

      • Gildahl

        PCVR development has shifted, not halted. Yeah, PCVR does “games”, but it’s main role in furthering VR today is in the realm of high-end headsets, supplemental tracking hardware, cockpit hobbyists, and in business and simulation applications. As for gaming, any complete VR enthusiast will have both a PC and at least one console and standalone headset since, by cost comparison, PS5s and Quests are impulse purchases, costing about the same as a basic push lawnmower. Personally, I prefer a PC for VR experiences and Nintendo Switch for gaming, but of course that’s just me. Consoles play mainstream games and not much else. PCs are for the else–something that is generally lost on gamers who believe that playing AAA games in VR is key to fulfilling the destiny of the technology. I remember my Dad and I watching some show back in the ’80s about early experimentation in the military with VR technology, and wanting so bad to be able to try that simulator that I saw on TV. Now I can play DCS in PCVR with physical cockpit controls and HOTAS in an aircraft model and graphical environment that eclipses what I saw back then. Still can’t do that on a console, nor am I sure when that will happen, UE5 notwithstanding.

        • ViRGiN

          Shifted to what?
          DCS, project cars and all sorts of other NICHE high quality simulators were ALWAYS around VR. Nothing has shifted in that regard and if anything, things slowed down even more!

          Those types of games are exactly what is NOT going to make PCVR any bigger.

          • Gildahl

            Uh, shifted to non-mainstream gaming. That would be simulations, business applications, high-end hardware, and modded PC games. Yeah, basically niche VR stuff the mainstream gamer could care less about, but which we PCVR folks who like our cockpits, retina resolution HMDs, and 200 degree FOVs kind of like. PCVR doesn’t need to get bigger. More deeply niche is actually fine with me.

          • ViRGiN

            So, it didn’t shift at all. Simulations, modded PC games, business apps – that has been active since the dawn of VR.
            It just never really went out of that sphere.

          • Gildahl

            The shift I’m referring to is a shift in ratio or specialty. For example, back in 2016 I pretty much only played video games in PCVR, mainly because that’s largely all there was and sims didn’t yet have VR support or were too much for the hardware, but in 2022 I play a lot more sims (because of the dramatic improvements in sw and hw), and toy with a lot more utility and experimental VR stuff such as painting, doing my own photogrammetry, sculpting for 3D printing, etc. You also see a significant proliferation of business applications on PC more recently, and the modding community is far more active today than it was even a year ago, with some pretty cool recent releases. So that’s what I mean by shifted. But recall that your OP said that PCVR development has *completely halted*, and I’m just here to say that’s silly–unless the only thing you think VR is for is AAA video games.

    • Ad

      Lumen is always deferred rending? I don’t believe that TAA was the only reason those games looked that bad, I’ve never toggled between FXAA, MSAA, and TAA and seen anything that bad.

    • Cless

      We just need to put in DLSS or FSR in there, no more AA needed.

  • Woah, I might have to try this out just to see it properly, even if it’d be a slideshow on my hardware. Surprised to hear Nanite and Lumen are getting any VR support. I was under the impression Epic wasn’t interested in providing that. Glad to see that isn’t fully the case.

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    They will be optimizing this for PSVR2 before anything else considering the money that Sony is paying Epic and how much UE5 was promoted on PS5.

  • Tommy

    This is why Praydog’s VR Injector mod is critical. Have you seen all the games coming to PCVR via this mod?

  • that’s great for epic.

  • gothicvillas

    Epic is working on Unreal VR implementation because PSVR2 is about to launch early next year. I think we may expect a few interesting surprise titles to come out.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      I too think that they worked on that for PSVR2 because if the money injection by Sony.

  • This is an absolute outstanding demonstration. I love it and hope to see it soon implemented! Bravo!

  • Shelby

    Looks great.

    • ViRGiN

      The Quest has better graphics for years.

      • ViRGiN

        gabe newell has more charisma than you do.

  • I would love to try a demo of this

    • Baldrickk

      I posted a reply with a link but it’s held in a queue, but youtube 5cUXC7ik-Gs is another lumen+nanite demo, and it has a download link in the description.

  • Yeshaya

    Is this demo available for general download? I’d love to try it out