A new short unity demo made its debut at Siggraph 2022 and is making further waves since, with just how good it looks. On top of the gorgeous lighting effects, the demo features some of the most realistic rendered fur we've ever seen, and hints that true next-generation games are going to be able to make it look much, much better.
Hair is one of those things that has looked good in movies for some time, but realtime rendering of all those strands is very difficult. New advances are being made, though, and this latest Unity demo runs in the commercial version of the software, on a PlayStation 5's APU. It's only 30 FPS, but that's at 4K too. Throw a 3080 at that thing and you'll see 60 FPS+ no problem.
This isn't the only demo that Unity has been impressing with lately, though. Just a few months ago it released Enemies, an example of some of the new high definition render pipeline changes that have been made to the engine, and a new high-end adaptive probe volume lighting system.
Standouts like reflections, skin tones, and the sheer warmth of the visuals show just how far this new version of the engine has come in the past few years.
It's all very exciting. Throw in what Epic is doing with Unreal, and it's clear that the next few years are going to see us getting very close to true to life visuals in the latest AAA games. Sure we're going to need ever more powerful graphics to run it, but that's coming in the next few months if all goes to plan.