Okay, this is absolutely insane. Over on Twitter, the excellent Reporters On Duty account has showcased a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
In particular, the demo showcases the excellent lighting effects that Lumen offers. It mainly focuses on the sun casting light across the ground, along with some excellent shadow effects.
What’s the Demo?
The demo goes by the name ‘Dragon Alley’, and showcases a baby dragon wandering around some cutesy medieval streets. Towards the end, we see a huge dragon fly in front of the sun, blocking it off with some excellent shadow effects.
There’s also a sequence showcasing a character wandering around in first person with a lantern. During that, we see Unreal Engine 5’s excellent physics on display. A door opens, causing fruit to realistically spill out onto the floor.
It Looks Like a Console Game!
What I find most impressive about this demo is that I’d be impressed with these visuals on console, let alone an upcoming mobile chipset. It’s a real warning shot at Apple, who recently unveiled vastly-improved ray tracing across its A17 and M3 chips.
This is exactly what mobile gaming needs: more competition across the hardware manufacturers. It’s looking increasingly likely that the platform will morph into a console-like experience over the next few years, which is incredibly exciting.
What Did Apple Announce?
On October 31, Apple finally unveiled its M3 family of chips, which offer a substantial increase in GPU performance. Granted, it’s not going into a phone, but it will eventually arrive on tablets, and provides a basis for mobile chips like the A17.
Without going into the boring details, it introduces considerable graphical performance improvements, and, for the first time ever, ray tracing. If numbers are your thing, the M3 can deliver the same performance as M1 at half the power, and 65% more performance at peak.
