But surely an engine can be made that would directly make use of the hardware that's available? Just as the same engine will make use of the extra 2tflops on the Xbox Seeies X, or the RTRT capabilities of the next Nvidia card.
If Epic have been working with Sony on this engine, which they have stated. The we can only assume that it has the capacity to make use of the significant IO capabilities. Surely that makes logical sense?
It's a bit lile people saying that deveopers will not make use of the extra compute in the Xbox because they can't conceptualise it. Doesn't mean it won't happen.
We don't know the extent of this demo's customisation for the PS5 (we know it runs on everything and runs at least okay on PC, in editor, with overheads). We don't know just how much work Sony have done with Epic on this demo - clearly they're providing devkits and updates on development software. Epic will be working closely with Sony, MS, Nvidia, AMD, Intel and everyone they can / need to.
I'm sure you can use the PS5's bandwidth and IO. I'm not sure this demo demonstrates anything that's only possible on that. We have some comments from Tim Sweeny, who isn't working on either Nanite or Luminous, and lack qualifying details. We also have some comments from an actual engineer working on the demo that are potentially somewhat contradictory, or then again potentially not that contradictory depending on what details you chose to insert into the blanks.
We'll know for sure when the demo lands on PC. If the demo runs okay on PC, even without DirectStorage, we'll have a good starting point to look back in time and see through the fog.