Exploring Redwood Forest has awakened the boy scout in me. Let me tell you about my exciting walk in the forest with consequences
I love nature! Nothing refreshes my spirit more than a long walk in the fresh air. Whether it”s rain, wind, snow or sunshine, I trudge around outside in any weather condition. That”s why I always set very high standards for vegetation in games, because my nature-loving eye immediately grasps coarse tree models or monotonous ground cover and the immersion suffers as a result.
I was all the more excited before starting the Redwood Forest demo, which relies on the brand new Unreal Engine 5.1 and uses its star features Nanite and Lumen to the hilt. Would the entertaining pastime be able to convince me? The short answer: Yes! The somewhat longer answer: Yes, but I could still make out a few wilted leaves in the otherwise fabulous greenery.
Nanite and Lumen show what they can do
The Unreal Engine 5.1 demo does not come from a private hobbyist, but from the company MAWI United, which offers the so-called (MW Redwood Tree Forest Biome) for sale to other developers in the official shop of the Unreal Engine. The price is a hefty 250 dollars, advertised as a procedural forest generation including highly detailed trees, stones and other assets.
To avoid buying the lumen cat in the nanite bag, a free demo is offered (here to go for direct download). Of course I won”t miss this opportunity to make you a new episode of my article series
The trip to the Redwood Forest captures my heart (for the most part) I have the opportunity to switch between two biomes: a forest in summer during the day and a forest in winter in deepest night. Both versions impress with a sometimes astonishingly photorealistic overall impression, depending on the camera setting.
In the summer version, Nanite”s geometry system can show its strengths to the full. Contrary to my expectations, it is not even the furrowed bark of the tree that excites me the most, but the forest floor. My goodness, what a level of detail! I can count the smallest pine needles and thanks to Nanite everything looks as if I could really touch it with my hand. Even bushes, grasses and ferns look first class, even up close.
Oh, you know what? Before you read on, why don”t you take a look for yourself:
In the winter version of Redwood Forest, however, Lumen makes me shine (that was a bad one, I know). Wow, when I trudge through the thick snow and try to make my way through the dense branches with the help of the torch, the scenery just looks fantastic! Visibility is further hampered by thick snowfall. I can”t wait for the day when games send me into such an atmospheric – and creepy as hell – winter idyll!
And what didn”t I like so much? As mentioned at the beginning, there are a few points that I definitely chalk up to the graphics demo:
- The shadows: The Unreal Engine and dynamic shadows, that is a red rag for me in many games anyway. Rarely are the possibilities of the technical underpinnings used skilfully and we are sold coarse-grained pixel mush as realistic shadow casting. This is also the case here: The shadows turn out to be meagre cheap bangers compared to the rest of the visual fireworks.
- The snow: This point of criticism is eliminated if you set the TSR (Temporal Super Resolution, the Unreal Engine”s in-house upscaling technology) to
Ultra
– but then you only have still images anyway. If you set the TSR toBalanced
to enjoy playable frame rates, the snow particles unfortunately flicker a lot and are frayed at the edges, which brings a lot of unrest into the picture. - The optimisation: Yes, this is not a game. And yes, this showcase is primarily to get developers to buy the product. Nevertheless, the demo makes a very poorly optimised impression in my eyes, high hardware requirements or not. Above all, Nanite can be used much more performantly since the engine update to version 5.1. This leads me to believe that we are dealing with an original UE5 demo that has hardly or not at all been optimised for the new version.
The bottom line is that I am still excited about Redwood Forest. As usual for Unreal Engine demos, of course, we”re only talking about a bit of fun that won”t keep you in front of the screen for more than 15 minutes – but my goodness, they”re something! See for yourself:
The system requirements are brutal
Before you start the demo, make yourself aware once again: this gimmick demands everything from your graphics card. As mentioned above, the makers didn”t exactly care about optimisation, which results in even GPUs of the calibre of a Geforce RTX 4090 breaking a sweat on ultra settings.
If you want to reach 40 FPS in 1920 x 1080 at moderate settings, you already need an RTX 2080. In my case, I tortured my mobile RTX 3070 in gaming mode and still turned all the controls up – as you know, I spare no effort for you!
The result is some beautiful screenshots, for which I traipsed through the forest at a crisp four frames per second. Only for the video did I reduce the settings a little in favour of a halfway presentable frame rate. This means that it is even more beautiful than in the video above!
But the Redwood Forest demo underlines one thing: The Unreal Engine 5.1 is the next important step for our favourite hobby to create even more impressive game worlds.
So much for my walk in the woods. Does this make you want to put on your hiking boots? Then I wish you a lot of fun and if you feel like it, you are very welcome to write your own opinion in the comments afterwards!
