There has been quite a bit of excitement since the Unreal Engine 5 technology demo "Lumen in the land of Nanite" was released. While we won't see anything using this technology anytime soon, and the engine itself won't be released until next year, that hasn't stopped a small war from breaking out among would-be fans of the next generation of consoles.

This escalated when an interview with an Epic China engineer (since deleted) revealed that the demo running on PS5 would work equally well on a laptop. In fact, the PS5 recorded 30 fps at 1440p, while the laptop recorded 40 fps at the same resolution.

The laptop in question is equipped with Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics and a 970 Evo Plus, and Epic's CTO Kim Libreri has confirmed that running UE5 on an RTX 2070 Super, for example, gives "pretty good" performance We've already seen this, but it's always good to get more concrete performance numbers.

Still, it seems odd to cite laptop SSDs alongside graphics cards, but this is the world we live in now, or rather the world we will live in if the next-gen hype lives up to its promise. This is because one of the PS5's big selling points is storage, with Sony claiming 9GB/s (using compression) and a straight throughput of 5.5GB/s. [Sweeney says the PS5's SSD is "god-level." He also explained that you can get "great performance" from NVMe SSDs on PCs, but this doesn't seem to be about ultra-high bandwidth PCIe 4.0 drives either. [Previous generation PCIe 3.0 solid state drives seem to be more than a match for the impressive UE5 technology.

For reference, the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, which appears to be on the laptop in question, has a throughput of 3.5 GB/s. While this is impressive, it is not the fastest drive you can buy and does not touch the growing number of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs that can achieve up to 5 GB/sec. In other words, the incredible fidelity that can be seen in the tech demo is not limited by the technology available in the current generation of modern PCs.

Epic's Tim Sweeney responded directly to reports of laptop performance, which only added to the confusion. His initial response was to dismiss the entire discussion because what was on display was demo footage of the PS5 running on a laptop, not the actual engine itself.

He is correct. But that was not what the engineer was referring to when he was talking about the actual performance of Unreal Engine 5 on his personally owned machine. It was apparently in response to a question in a longer, broader article about the impressive UE5 technology.

Later, in a Twitter thread, Sweeney explained that VSync was holding back some of PS5's performance, and that behind the scenes it was delivering "much higher" frame times than 30fps.

He then shut down any further questions with the classic wait and see:

Unreal Engine 5 is cross-platform and will eventually be released on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and at some point in 2021. It is worth emphasizing again that it will run on PC. In other words, this spear-wielding is essentially pointless, but we don't want the simple fact to get in the way of tribalism.

In related news (as an aside), a certain Martin Nevelong has successfully stitched together the opening sequence of "Lumen in the land of Nanite" using "Dreams" on PS4. It is impressive not only for how it looks in the end, but also for the fact that it was created in two hours simply using the console (sped up for your enjoyment).