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One of the talking points for UE5 is how much more detailed games can look thanks to its new Nanite tech, which makes it possible to render millions of triangles each with 8K textures attached. In other words the rocks looked real good and Epic wanted to give people a few seconds to appreciate them.

Special projects technical director at Epic, Jeff Farris, elaborated on Twitter saying that the close-up was also meant to show off the new tech’s audio capabilities. In it, the noises created as the protagonist grunts, grabs the rock face, and shimmies through sound different and like they’re emanating from a particular place in the environment. Who knows how well actual next-gen games will be able to make use of these effects, but in the demo they’re extremely convincing.

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The Epic spokesperson said a previous version of the demo script pointed out that none of this was a trick meant to hide load times, but those lines were cut in the final edit.