It's rumoured that the PlayStation 5's graphics chip will sit somewhere between GeForce's latest GPUs: the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2080. This tech demo published by Square Enix studio Luminous Productions is fascinating, then, as it's leveraging the latter's considerable horsepower. It's running on the Luminous Engine, which the Japanese publisher hopes will "advance" its next-gen gaming efforts.

"The BackStage tech demo realizes real-time rendering at the highest global standards," a press release explained. "Imagine an actress sitting in front of the mirror, preparing to go on stage – by enabling path tracing support which has been proved to be one of the most challenging real-time rendering techniques thus far, the actress’ presence is depicted in a stunningly realistic and enriching manner, as if her emotions themselves are reflected in the mirror, with such quality that would have been inconceivable with the previous real-time rendering technologies."

We Googled path tracing so you don't have to, and it all boils down to more realistic global illumination. To be honest, we weren't as impressed with the tech demo as we expected to be, but it's clear that it's a step ahead of what's available on current consoles at the minute. It'll be interesting to see how close the PS5 comes to achieving this.

[source youtube.com, via gematsu.com]