One of the centerpiece features of Unreal Engine 5, which is being demonstrated today, is Temporal Super Resolution, an impressive-sounding feature that Epic says will enable the high-end graphics you see in the tech demos (so far, mostly rocks, but they look great). rocks) that you see in tech demos.

In a nutshell, Temporal Super Resolution is a way for the PC to keep up with the geometry details that UE5's Nanite technology and Lumen global illumination technology allow to be placed in a scene, while maintaining a reasonable frame rate. Much like Nvidia DLSS, there is not much of a distinction between anti-aliasing technology and upscaling capabilities. [UE5's new anti-aliasing solution, temporal super-resolution, addresses this new geometry detail and creates sharper, more stable images than ever before, with quality approaching true native 4K at the cost of 1080p," said Epic.

Epic cites the following benefits of Temporal Super Resolution:

Optimized shaders for PS5 and Series X," i.e., AMD RDNA 2 optimizations.

AMD states that it has "worked closely with Epic to optimize TSR functionality on Radeon-powered systems."

TSR, a standard feature of UE5, is enabled on all GPUs, not only PC, but also PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S as well as on PCs, providing state-of-the-art upscaling.

The freedom to work with all common APIs and hardware (including Nvidia GPUs, of course) is sure to be a huge boon for Temporal Super Resolution.

Two different screenshots of Epic's UE5 are shown below, one rendered at native 4K and the other rendered at 1080p and displayed at 4K. To see the difference, check out the full-size images on the UE5 documentation page.

The native 4K frame records 18.6 fps, while the frame rendered at 1080p records 43 fps.

According to Epic, this is an entirely new algorithm created from scratch and completely replaces Temporal AA in Unreal Engine 4. Engine 4 already uses a form of it in temporal accumulation. In effect, this is a way to use data from previous frames (and thus "temporal") to add detail to the current frame.

Epic, when talking about Unreal Engine 5 this time last year, promised that the use of temporal data would increase further in Unreal Engine 5, and Temporal Super Resolution appears to be a major new feature in that regard. This 4K performance boost certainly cannot be overlooked, if it works as promised.

Unreal Engine 5 is scheduled for release in early 2022, and more information will likely be forthcoming in the meantime. Until then, you can download a taste of UE5 in Early Access.