Unreal Tech Demo Shows Off Game Engine Graphics, Tries Not to Melt PCs
Pasquale Scionti, a Principal Cinematic Lighting Artist with Gunzilla Games, and who’s worked with Ninja Theory and Treyarch, released a visually impressive Unreal tech demo on April 6, 2025. It was designed to showcase the latest version of the engine, 5.5.4, and how fancy graphics can be achieved without typical upscaling features like DLSS.
However, Unreal Engine is considered by many game developers to be better for consoles than PCs, so it’s possible lower end gaming rigs could really struggle with the demo. To try and combat this, Scionti has said how he achieved the demo’s look.
“The goal for this project was to create a Cyberpunk scene using only dynamic lighting. No Lumen, no Pathtrace, no RTX, no DLSS, no Baked,” he said in a post on his official X (Twitter) channel.
“Runs at 60 FPS 1440p Native 100% resolution with Epic Settings, and Vsync on RTX4090. Make sure you have a graphic card that supports RTX to benefit of Raytraced Ambient Occlusion/Reflections and Shadows.”
Good Graphics vs Good Performance
Unreal Engine is noted for its powerful capabilities, in terms of game development, and this includes how it handles things like graphics. However, this doesn’t always translate well to the actual devices that run the games.
As Bryan Heemskerk, Art Director with Massive Damage (Fera: The Sundered Tribes, Star Renegades) noted in a recent appearance on the popular Moore’s Law Is Dead podcast:
“Unreal Engine 5 is doing a lot of new heavy stuff that gives game developers potential that they haven’t had before, specifically in regards to time of day systems and the sheer amount of geometry they’re allowed to put into their worlds.”
“There are unique systems that in theory will push games to the next level. The problem is that they’re taking all our performance right away. Between Lumen and Nanite, there just isn’t much performance left.”
To DLSS or Not DLSS
NVIDIA is making waves at the moment by pushing out constant game updates implementing its DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) tech. This uses AI-powered neural rendering to enhance graphics and framerates, especially in terms of latency for the latter and lighting effects for the former.
Another point Heemskerk made is that technology is not actually ready to handle Unreal 5, as even fancy graphics cards like NVIDIA’s current RTX 50 series struggle with some Unreal games on PC. However, this is also due to a well-publicized issue involving Unreal Engine 5 and NVIDIA RTX 50 series also no longer supporting PhysX, Unreal’s previous built-in physics engine.
As a lot of the issues with Unreal Engine 5 do involve graphics, Scionti wanted to show that it’s possible to make something that can, or should, run on lower-end PCs without using DLSS features. By focusing on game engine options, primarily dynamic lighting, it’s possible to make a game that looks good and runs well without turning a PC into a molten mess.
