Revision 1

Overview

Neverness to Everness is built on Unreal Engine 5 and makes extensive use of its latest rendering technologies. On PC, the game supports full ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation, Nanite virtualized geometry, and Lumen global illumination. These features combine to produce some of the most visually ambitious environments seen in an anime-style open-world RPG.

The city of Hethereau features dynamic weather, a full day-night cycle, and real-time environmental transformations during supernatural events. Weather conditions affect not just visuals but also gameplay; rain changes vehicle handling and alters the atmosphere of the city.

Unreal Engine 5 Technologies

Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Neverness to Everness employs Nanite, Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system, to render highly detailed environments without manual level-of-detail (LOD) authoring. Every corner of Hethereau is crafted with dense geometric detail, from storefronts and alleyways to rooftop structures and underground tunnels. Nanite allows the engine to stream and render only the triangles visible on screen, keeping performance stable even in densely populated urban areas.

Lumen Global Illumination

Lumen provides real-time global illumination and reflections throughout Hethereau. Light bounces realistically off surfaces, producing natural ambient lighting in interiors and soft indirect shadows in outdoor environments. During the Co-Ex Test beta, some players reported a ghosting artifact associated with Lumen in certain areas. The development team acknowledged this issue in the launch roadmap and confirmed fixes are in progress.

Ray Tracing and Path Tracing

On PC, Neverness to Everness offers both standard ray tracing and full path tracing modes. Path tracing simulates the physical behavior of light more accurately, producing film-quality lighting, reflections, and shadows. This mode is designed for high-end hardware, particularly NVIDIA RTX 40 and 50 series GPUs.

• Ray Tracing: Enhanced reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion with hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

• Path Tracing: Full simulation of light transport for the most realistic rendering possible. Best suited for screenshot capture and high-end systems.

NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation

DLSS 4 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) uses an AI transformer model to upscale lower-resolution frames while maintaining visual fidelity. The Multi-Frame Generation feature, available on RTX 50 series GPUs, generates additional frames between rendered frames, significantly boosting frame rates. This technology reduces latency and enhances visual quality simultaneously, making ray tracing and path tracing viable at high resolutions.

Graphics Presets

The PC version offers several graphics quality presets that adjust multiple settings at once. While the exact preset names and individual setting granularity may vary, the following table summarizes the typical tiers based on the system requirements.

Note: Exact preset names and settings may differ at launch. This table reflects expected tiers based on confirmed system requirements and graphics technologies.

Visual Effects

Dynamic Weather

Hethereau features real-time weather transitions between clear skies, rain, overcast, fog, and heavy snowfall. Weather changes affect lighting conditions, surface reflections (wet surfaces become reflective), and particle effects. Rain and snow use PBR (physically based rendering) materials with subsurface scattering for realistic snowflake and raindrop appearance.

Day-Night Cycle

The full day-night cycle produces dramatic shifts in ambient lighting, with Lumen recalculating global illumination in real time. City lights, neon signs, and vehicle headlamps activate at dusk and cast dynamic shadows through Hethereau's streets.

Supernatural Transformations

During Anomaly encounters, the environment can shift into surreal, otherworldly states. These transformations use custom shader effects, volumetric fog, and color grading to create a stark visual contrast between the normal city and its supernatural counterpart.

Console and Mobile

On PlayStation 5, the game targets optimized settings with dynamic resolution scaling. The PS5 Pro Enhanced version offers improved visual fidelity. Mobile platforms (iOS and Android) use scalable quality settings adapted for mobile GPUs, with reduced draw distances and simplified lighting compared to PC.

The Mac version runs on Apple Silicon (M1 or later) using Metal rendering. Ray tracing availability on Mac depends on the specific hardware and macOS support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing.