The impressive Unreal Engine 5 The Old West: Northwood tech demo was recently updated with support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 and tons of next-gen visual improvements that make it more impressive.
Thanks to NVIDIA DLSS 3 support, owners of RTX 4000 series cards can experience how Frame Generation works in Unreal Engine 5.2. The new update also updates AMD FSR to version 2.1.1, so those trying the game with other GPUs can still get acceptable performance.
The addition of NVIDIA DLSS 3 support is only one of the many improvements introduced by The Old West: Northwood new update. The demo now features reworked lighting to achieve a more realistic feel, reworked volumetrics, improved weather conditions, enhanced landscape texture quality, streetlights casting contact shadows, improved sound and animations, improved performance, tweaked graphics presets, and much more. The latest version of the demo can be downloaded from here. The full patch notes can be found here.
While independent developers doing an excellent job showcasing the power of Unreal Engine 5, bigger studios obviously need more time to release new games powered by the engine. Among the latest UE5-powered games is Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear, which is an excellent showcase of what can be achieved visually with it, as I highlighted in my review.
They say an artist’s work is never truly done, but with Layers of Fear, Bloober Team and Anshar Studios have completed the Master Opus started back in 2016. With superb UE5-powered visuals, improved writing and some new gameplay mechanics, these journeys into the darkest recesses of the human mind have never been so immersive, although some issues prevent Layers of Fear from being an absolute masterpiece.
