Unity, the maker of one of the most popular game development engines in the world, has just released a new demo showcasing the capabilities of its latest Unity 6 engine. Called Time Ghost, the new video shows the stunning visuals that can be achieved with the engine’s tech while running on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and it looks amazing.
Previous Unity engines have been used to power some of the best PC games around, including Cuphead, and Hollow Knight. Unity 6 is still in the preview stage at the moment, but is already available for game developers to try out.
The new demo depicts an apparently time-spanning story of two people seeking to find each other, taking in stunning grass and tree-covered mountain vistas, smoky battle scenes, and impressive up-close facial animation with realistic hair.
Ironically, though, not long into the piece, it shows perhaps the least impressive aspect of the engine when hundreds of leaves are shown suddenly rising up from the ground (above). Individually, they actually look rather basic, though they create an amazing effect when combined in large numbers (below).
More impressive is the grass effect that covers much of the battlefield and subsequent… well, field scene. Seemingly millions of blades of yellowing, seed-filled grass fill the scene, swaying in the wind and getting brushed aside by running combatants.
As our protagonist rises from an exhausted slumber, they brush their hand through their hair, showing off the impressive hair animation.
Next up, we see a distant mountain rendered with thousands of realistic-looking trees, with a subsequent closeup view of our protagonist walking along a mountain road, showing more incredible-looking green grass and other foliage on the mountainside.
A trip to a ruined, Acropolis-like mountaintop building showcases the engine’s ability to render realistic rocks, while a final embrace of the two characters once again shows us the incredible skin, hair, and overall facial details achievable with the engine.
What’s interesting to note is that the demo makes no attempt to explain any of the tech behind the scene. Comparatively, Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 demos have often explained the tech right as it’s shown onscreen, as with this demo. However, Unity does have another video here that explains the features and plans for Unity 6, and you can learn more about the Time Ghost demo here.
Some of the features highlighted on this page include a host of graphics effects, such as Smoke Lighting and Scenario Blending for rendering the scene, along with its Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) Entity Component System (ECS) framework, which can manage the (up to) 12 million instances of vegetation in the scene.
Machine learning, via Unity Sentis, was also used to create the clothing animation, helping to reduce the animation data from 2.5GB to 47MB. Then, of course, there’s the new Hair System, which includes “seamless rendering LOD, automatic LOD generation, volumetric wind, and more” to create those flowing locks.
The site also details some of the specs of the system on which the demo was run. As well as using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 to render the 4K output, it also uses an Intel Core i9-14900K for its CPU.
In watching the video as a whole, one factor that isn’t discussed on the company’s website, but which seems obvious in the final result,t is the amount of either upscaling, or what is likely to be temporal anti-aliasing, that’s being employed, nor how many post-processing effects are being applied. Effects such as motion blur – that aren’t computationally difficult – can hide a lot of sins.
As such, there’s a smoothness and lack of crisp details that will, in part, be down to the compression of video in general and of YouTube in particular, but also seemingly is part of the rendering process of the video. Comparing it back-to-back with the Unreal Engine 5 demo video linked above, the latter just looks crisp whereas the Unity 6 video looks soft. Regardless, the overall effect is still striking.
As for when we can expect any games to come out based on Unity 6, the company outlines in the above Unity 6 explainer video that the engine will be available as a final release for developers to work with towards the end of this year, so no new games will use it before then. However, we could see games that have been developed with the preview version released soon after the full public release.
In the meantime, if watching the combat in this video has put you in mind for a fight, check out our pick of the best war games on PC for a host of ways to scratch that itch.
