I think this will go longer.
The roll out of UE5 took longer than they expected, and no hardware is powerful enough to exploit it to any degree yet.
For a game to look like the Matrix, running at 60fps, full lumen and high res textures, we will needing GPUs of 50tflops at this point, minimum. The next gen of consoles will be lucky to be half that.
Normally another evolution of UE doesn't happen until there are enough new feature sets to vindicate the new generation.
The jump from UE4 to UE5 has been the biggest so far with Lumen and Nanite.
Game design boils down to a certain number of things. Lighting, textures, animation and Al amongst them.
UE5 brought out Nanite to cull triangles and address LOD, and Luman was their lighting solution for GI, which is a massive resource hog. I have heard it said it is as bad as RT.
So what could be new for UE to vindicate the new generation?
I'm not saying you are wrong, far from it, and I don't know what's in the Unreal pipeline, I just see we are half way through the generation now, maybe 2 or 3 games have released on UE5, and they have been rough to say the least.
I just think that the power the next gen consoles have, still won't be enough to exploit UE5.
Epic doesn't care what tflops next gen consoles will be. Plenty of games ran well on UE4 at measly 1.3 teraflops of the PS4. Consoles don't determine how powerful the next engine will be. UE is very scaleable and has been for decades now.
And what you mean it took a while for UE5 to come into the cycle of the generation? UE5 was announced on in May 2020, which is 6 months before the release of the new gen consoles. It takes time for the engine to picked up and learned by the dvelopers and you are also forgetting that 2020 was also the year when the apocalypse began which delayed things a tad bit. UE5 was the released into preview mode in February of 2022 which is less than 2 years and finally fully released out of beta preview in August of that same year.
Then, in November of 2022 Unreal Engine 5.1 was fully released, fast forward to May of 2023 Unreal Engine 5.2 was released and now recently a few weeks ago or so Unreal Engine 5.3 is now released as well. They really spiked and speed through the iterations within less than a year. I am projecting 5.4 for either Novemeber or December, but since it might be holidays then January or February for sure.
We also got our first Unreal Engine 5.1 game in August of this year. Granted it was a bit doo doo but it was still the first release. Also, for your info, the very first Unreal Engine 4 game that was released for the PS4/X1 era was Dead by Daylight, it came out in April 14th of 2014. That game still looks like shit to this day despite the fact there are plenty of beautiful UE4 games out there now.
Yeah, sooner than a UE5 game, but we were not in a middle of an apocalypse. Also, UE4 didn't have as many new fancy features to fuck around with like UE5 is. UE5 is a much bigger leap than UE3 to UE4 was based from what I been seeing snd experimenting with myself in the privacy of my own home. A lot of indie devs are also quite happy with how full featured it is and what kind of stuff they can achieve with it.
The next big thing in gaming and engines in general won't just be a much higher polycount but also massive advancements in AI. AI is the next big huge leap for the industry and not just the world. And of course lighting, higher res textures, bigger worlds, will also be a part of it. If you look at Fortnite today running on max settings on a 4090 RTX with Lumen the game ends up looking like a borderline CG Pixar film. But you'd have too see it in person, especially at 140+ FPS.
if you are a 3d film production studio, you can render your entire 3d film now in Unreal Engine 5. Previously, you weren't able to do that, thats another cool thing as well. Unreal Engine 5 is not for just games anymore, but other industries as well, or 3d industries I should say rather.