An exciting new tech demo powered by Unreal Engine 5.5.3 has been unveiled, providing players with an immersive walkthrough of a futuristic cyberpunk city. This project, brought to life by artist Sciontidesign, takes inspiration from the iconic Samaritan UE3 demo, the visually rich Blade Runner franchise, and the captivating aesthetics of Cyberpunk 2077. The demo was demonstrated on high-end hardware, including an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU, an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM running at 6000MHz.

This technical showcase is remarkable for its exclusive use of dynamic lighting, highlighting the capabilities of Nanite with Distance Field Meshes and Ambient Occlusion, combined with Screen Space Reflections. Remarkably, it does not utilize advanced features such as Lumen, Path Tracing, RTX, DLSS, or baked lighting, thus emphasizing what UE5 can achieve even without its most sophisticated tools.

While the rain effect in the demo might seem somewhat artificial, the rendering of wet surfaces is executed with impressive detail, significantly enhancing the depth of the urban environment. However, the experience is marred by frequent invisible walls, which detract from the overall immersion. Despite the consistently stunning visuals delivered by Unreal Engine 5 tech demos, games developed on this engine often face performance challenges when applied in real-world scenarios.