Earlier this month during the big Xbox Games Showcase, we finally got our first look the Unreal-Engine-5-powered “AAAA” Perfect Dark revival, with Microsoft claiming what we saw was actual gameplay. Now, that comes with a number of asterisks – what we saw was clearly a very curated vertical slice of the game and it isn’t even clear if the footage was running on PC or Xbox Series X, but still, Microsoft insists it was gameplay, so it bears analysis.
Enter the tech heads at Digital Foundry, who have gone over the Perfect Dark trailer, and found it exemplified both the strengths and weaknesses of Unreal Engine 5. You can check out Digital Foundry’s full video below, provided you have around 10 minutes to spare, or you can scroll on down for our rundown of the important points.
First off, there’s the question of what the Perfect Dark trailer was running on. Digital Foundry suspects it was PC, but the performance and resolution of that trailer indicates it may have been running on more limited Xbox Series X hardware. Then again, it could just be that the PC version of Perfect Dark hasn’t been properly optimized yet or they were intentionally running the game on PC with XSX equivalent settings.
Moving on from that question, it does seem like Perfect Dark is tapping into Unreal Engine 5’s suite of tools, with Digital Foundry clearly identifying Lumen lighting techniques in use. It seems like the game is likely using software-powered Lumen, rather than the potentially-more-versatile hardware-based Lumen, but that isn’t rare (few games use hardware Lumen).
Less positively, like seemingly most UE5 games, the Perfect Dark demo had it share of performance issues. Per Digital Foundry, framerate during the trailer is “not stable” and pixel counting reveals it was running at around 1440p. Further analysis seems to show the gameplay was actually upscaled to 1440p, and that its native resolution was somewhere in the range of 720p to 960p.
Again, this was just an early vertical slice of the game – it’s likely the game is still a couple years away at least, so take all this with a grain of salt. The game may change quite significantly before launch and the underlying UE5 tech will also be updated. That said, in a lot, if not the majority, of cases, games are actually downgraded from their early vertical slice showings. We’ll see what happens in this case.
Perfect Dark is coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S. A release window has not been specified.
