Forget PS5: PCs With RTX 2070 Super Can Handle Unreal Engine 5 Demo

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By Niels Broekhuijsen
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You'll also need an NVMe SSD.

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Just a few days ago Epic Games showed off its new Unreal Engine 5 demo, which blew us away with its impressive graphics. Running on an AMD RDNA-infused PlayStation 5 (PS5) it made console gaming -- or at least its future -- look exciting and promising.  And that just in time for the PS5 vs. Xbox Series X next-gen console war to start raging.

But what about the best gaming PCs? Did Unreal's demo prove that consoles are finally clawing their way to the gaming throne? We wouldn't bank on it yet. In light of the Unreal Engine 5 demo every gamer's now talking about, there's still reason to hang onto your PC. 

In covering the Unreal demo, World Today News quoted Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri as saying the awe-inspiring demo will work "pretty good" on a PC running an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card. You'd also need a good NVMe SSD, (the PS5 also has an SSD). 

Of course, Libreri's statement doesn't tell us much by itself. It's unclear whether the RTX 2070 Super is adequate to run the demo at 4K resolution  or at 60 frames per second (fps).

However, given that the PS5 has just over 10 TFlops of GPU performance, and the RTX 2070 Super has 9 TFlops, we reckon the RtX 2070 Super is indeed sufficient for running Nanite at 1440p and 30 fps, just like it did on the PS5. 

The new Unreal Engine 5 demo showcases what happens when a game engine can run billions of triangles, global illumination and presumably ray tracing, along with spatialized audio, proper physics interactions and more. 

It will be quite some time before we see the first games based on Unreal Engine 5. But hopefully by the time that happens there will be more graphics cards out that can run the new game engine, and the minimum required spec is more approachable for the average PC gamer. Why should console gamers have all the fun? 

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

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41 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Thretosix
    There's no doubt that both consoles are doing a great job for the cost. The idea that the technology crushes a PC's performance was laughable. The statement in the video seemed nothing more than a paid promotion. Many people won't look to see if things are true or not. The RTX 2070 is a midrange card for the somewhat current / last generation of GPU's, NVME M.2's are pretty easy to come by. The new AMD Navi GPU's and Nvidia 3000 series will be way ahead of the upcoming consoles. For a price though, which is usually the case for high end PC gaming. Only people they were fooling are people who just hear what they want to hear instead of accepting reality. I don't get the attacks these days. Everyone is going to win this generation regardless of platform.
    Reply
  • TEAser00
    "You need a nvme ssd, ps5 also has a ssd"
    There currently isn't a ssd on the market as fast as the PS5 ssd, so a gaming pc would cut it. You would be able to run this demo, as you would be able to stream data fast enough. The PS5 would even beat a 2080ti in that remark. The future will be in super fast ssd's, gaming pcs will lag behind for a while.
    Reply
  • GenericUser
    TEAser00 said:
    "You need a nvme ssd, ps5 also has a ssd"
    There currently isn't a ssd on the market as fast as the PS5 ssd, so a gaming pc would cut it. You would be able to run this demo, as you would be able to stream data fast enough. The PS5 would even beat a 2080ti in that remark. The future will be in super fast ssd's, gaming pcs will lag behind for a while.

    It's not that the SSD in the PS5 is necessarily "faster" than a typical desktop PC. The speed primarily comes from a custom controller made for the console that lets developers use some tricks not available on a PC because of said custom hardware. Otherwise, it's more or less the same as any comparable one you could buy for a desktop computer.
    Reply
  • rumple99
    If a 2070 can run it no doubt a GTX 1080 can run it. Don't believe the Unreal/PS 5 hype
    Reply
  • The Black Alpha Wolf
    Of coarse it can run on a 2070. It's built to scale!!!! UE5 can also run off a smartphone. But for all the extra goodies, like the 3D audio, and SSD specifically, nothing touching the PS5. We BARELY getting simple NVMe 4.0 Drives in. So everything have to "load" into memory.
    Reply
  • watzupken
    There is no doubt that PC can run the demo equal or faster than a PS5. This is nothing new to me.

    As to why the SSD is faster on the console, I believe it could be due to,
    Lighter OS for console - This translates to less disk activities on consoles, unlike on Windows 10
    Ram caching - Just my speculation here - SSDs nowadays have very high sequential read/write speed, but this does not translate to a significant improvement as we can see in our day to day PC usage. Since this is a custom design SSD for console, there could be a chance they may have utilized some level of RAM caching considering its got 16GB of GDDR6 to spare.
    I doubt any customized software can do miracles with the current SSD technology. If so, we should have seen them in the retail market as well.
    Reply
  • The Black Alpha Wolf
    watzupken said:
    There is no doubt that PC can run the demo equal or faster than a PS5. This is nothing new to me.

    As to why the SSD is faster on the console, I believe it could be due to,
    Lighter OS for console - This translates to less disk activities on consoles, unlike on Windows 10
    Ram caching - Just my speculation here - SSDs nowadays have very high sequential read/write speed, but this does not translate to a significant improvement as we can see in our day to day PC usage. Since this is a custom design SSD for console, there could be a chance they may have utilized some level of RAM caching considering its got 16GB of GDDR6 to spare.I doubt any customized software can do miracles with the current SSD technology. If so, we should have seen them in the retail market as well.


    Isn't just the lighter OS. it is the optimization they did from the 12 channels, to the six prioritization levels, to the I/O and it's coprocessors that is specifically made for the system. PCIe 4.0 WILL be compatible with the PS5, but it has to run at the speed, and the SoC will have to do some stuff to make sure that it run close to the PS5's onboard SSD.

    My take though, next year someone will make, if not work with Sony themselves, will make an SSD like the PS5's.

    And you 100% right. Current SSD tech, especially on PCIe 3.0 won't be enough to do it.


    But the UE5 will run on everything. It is even in movies. So don't know why people mad. There will be stuff like the PS5 and the XSX where it will take advantage of the dedicated hardware that will gibe it a slight edge.

    But at the end of the day, how good that game is. The tech is there. It won't matter when we press play!
    Reply
  • russell_john
    TEAser00 said:
    "You need a nvme ssd, ps5 also has a ssd"
    There currently isn't a ssd on the market as fast as the PS5 ssd, so a gaming pc would cut it. You would be able to run this demo, as you would be able to stream data fast enough. The PS5 would even beat a 2080ti in that remark. The future will be in super fast ssd's, gaming pcs will lag behind for a while.

    Actually there are already PCIe 4.0 SSD drives on the market that are just as fast .... The PS5 has a compression chip but it's not going to be utilized properly for at least 2 years because of backwards compatibility with the PS4 that all games are going to have for at least the next two years until game developers drop support for the PS4 ..... By that time the PC will have even faster SSDs and mostly likely there will be Gaming SSD's with a similar compression chip built-in that will exceed the performance of the PS5's SSD compression tech

    Game consoles will always be hampered by two things, the need for backwards compatibility for obsolete hardware for the 1st two years and the ridiculously long 7 year Development Cycle which makes backwards compatibility even worse because 7 year old technology in the 21st century is actually obsolete

    Meanwhile PC technology is on a 1-2 year development cycle and we'll get 4 upgrades or more in the same time period you get just 1 .... It's always going to win because of that unless Sony shortens their Development Cycle by at least half .... Before the PS5 even releases we'll have the next gen CPUs (Zen 3) and next gen GPUs (Ampere) that will smoke the PS5's Zen 2 and RDNA2 CPU/GPU combo and by the time backwards compatibility with the PS4 is dropped we'll likely have Zen 4 and another new generation of GPUs

    And we'll still have the real icing on the cake .... Game Mods that can't be done on consoles ... Witcher 3 on a PS5 is still going to look like Witcher 3 on a PS 4 while my current iteration on PC looks as good as any game released in 2019 and easily does 1440p @60 FPS
    Reply
  • The Black Alpha Wolf
    russell_john said:
    Actually there are already PCIe 4.0 SSD drives on the market that are just as fast .... The PS5 has a compression chip but it's not going to be utilized properly for at least 2 years because of backwards compatibility with the PS4 that all games are going to have for at least the next two years until game developers drop support for the PS4 ..... By that time the PC will have even faster SSDs and mostly likely there will be Gaming SSD's with a similar compression chip built-in that will exceed the performance of the PS5's SSD compression tech

    Game consoles will always be hampered by two things, the need for backwards compatibility for obsolete hardware and the ridiculously long 7 year Development Cycle which makes backwards compatibility even worse because 7 year old technology in the 21st century is actually obsolete

    Meanwhile PC technology is on a 1-2 year development cycle and we'll get 4 upgrades or more in the same time period you get just 1 .... It's always going to win because of that unless Sony shortens their Development Cycle by at least half .... Before the PS5 even releases we'll have the next gen CPUs (Zen 3) and next gen GPUs (Ampere) that will smoke the PS5's Zen2 and RDNA2 CPU/GPU combo

    The SSD number of 5.5Gbps is a RAW number and doesn't use the compression chip. Though the Kranken formatting will take full advantage of it. The PS5 will be able in some cases be able to do up to 22Gbps thru compression, though they gave a more realistic number of 10Gbps.

    And speed isn't the only thing the PS5 will be concerned with.
    Reply
  • russell_john
    The Black Alpha Wolf said:
    The SSD number of 5.5Gbps is a RAW number and doesn't use the compression chip. Though the Kranken formatting will take full advantage of it. The PS5 will be able in some cases be able to do up to 22Gbps thru compression, though they gave a more realistic number of 10Gbps.

    And speed isn't the only thing the PS5 will be concerned with.


    The problem is and I already mentioned this it can't be fully utilized and still have backwards comparability with the PS4 .... It will only work at it's full potential for games and game engines that are PS5 only ..... And you won't be seeing those for a couple more years and PC's will have caught up and exceeded that tech by then ..... The only reason we aren't seeing this compression tech on PCs now is there aren't any game to use it but a year from now there will be and you'll see the same compression technology on PC PCIe 4.0 SSDs especially if they can leverage it for use in servers which is very likely especially when combined with Nvidia's Ampere technology which is for more than just gaming GPUs but also for parallel processing in servers and they are also going to want that high throughput and even more from their SSDs
    Reply