Unreal Engine 5 just got released, but its tech demo and early access has been around for a while, and pretty widely accessible at that.
If you haven't seen the demo for Unreal Engine 5, this is what it looks like:
All of that footage is 100% real time, and there are people who have already been making other things that are even more insanely difficult for a computer to render. If you don't believe it and you have a solid GPU, just download UE5 and import some Quixel megascans and start duplicating them. It's free to use unless you make a million dollars or more off of your project.
How UE5 would contribute to a high res game like Valheim, without even necessarily requiring a massive budget, and possibly doable on an indie budget. Additionally, all of UE5's algorithms are super efficient, so you only need the computing power of a PS5. After GPU manufacturers catch up to the whole crypto nonsense, they'll
Nanite – the polygon crunching algorithm, that allows for ridiculously dense polygon counts. How this helps a Valheim-like game is that it lets you see into the distance as far as the eye can see. So, if you make a massive castle, you'll still see it perfectly in the distance, even from as far away as you'd like to be.
Lumen – Dynamic lighting that is high quality means no baking normal maps, which means you can just have your high quality lighting apply to all of these constructed pieces.
Quixel – With craploads of plug and play megascans, many of which are simply building pieces. You could also make custom megascans and use them in your game.
Then, using physically based rendering (PBR), you could make one hell of a procedural environment. (The snow in Valheim is an example of PBR, where you get to a certain elevation and then you suddenly have snow on everything).
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/tzlfoe/imagining_a_photorealistic_valheimlike_game_in/
