Why do video games in 2026 still not look as good as this old PS5 Unreal Engine 5 demo?

Over five years ago, Epic Games dropped the Lumen in the Land of Nanite tech demo running on PlayStation 5 to unveil the power of Unreal Engine 5. The demo showcased the breakthrough features of Nanite's virtualized micropolygon geometry for extreme detail and Lumen for fully dynamic global illumination.

Since then, Unreal Engine 5 has unsurprisingly claimed a place in our pick of the best game development software. It's also now the biggest engine in terms of game sales (although Unity remains the most-used engine overall). But that May 2020 demo has resurfaced, and some people are wondering, why do games in 2026 still not look like that?

Epic's original PS5 Unreal Engine 5 tech demo represented something of a milestone for next-gen gaming. It highlighted the PS5's storage bandwidth and the ability to achieve unprecedented realism and massive environments without traditional loading screens or lightmaps.

Whether games have yet achieved the visuals it promised can be debated, and that's just what's happening after someone asked on X “why haven't games come close to this yet?”

For many, it's a valid question. After all, five years have passed since that tech demo promised such impressive realism. But, as some devs are pointing out in the responses, there are a couple of big issues at play.

For a start, playable games aren't tech demos, which show prerendered and optimised scenes with much, much smaller file sizes. A full game has more clipping and motion physics that require more pipeline debugging, one dev notes.

There's also the issue of how long it takes to produce an AAA title. Five years might seem like a long time, but it's not in game development terms. Some suggest that only in 2026 will we start to see games that realise the promise of the demo, with Fable and The Witcher 4 the main candidates.

Others argue that some recent games, such as Mafia the Old Country, Horizon Forbidden West. Assassin's Creed Shadows, Black Myth Wukong, Avatar and Death Stranding, did actually achieve such a level of visual splendour.

But some don't agree that it's purely a case of development timelines, suggesting that the problem is the hardware. They argue that devs need to stop catering to players with older gear or to those who play on iPhones and Nintendo Switch if they want to achieve the most cutting-edge graphics.

“PS5 doesnt have the hardware to run games at this high of a framerate at this high of fidelity. People spend $4000 on high end hardware to do this and its barely enough,” one person suggests. “A PS5 is a very low-end gaming computer with a customer user interface and a controller.”

“Devs have to stop catering to old consoles if we all want game quality to reach new levels,” another person claims.

We've already seen a lot of debate about this with the Unreal Engine 5 performance issues, which Epic thinks are due to devs not optimising thoroughly. What do you think? Will 2026 be the year that video games finally achieve the deluxe visuals of that 2020 Unreal Engine 5 demo?