Volvo Partners With Fortnite Dev for Sick In-Car Graphics

Beyond that, though, I’m struggling to imagine how more lifelike graphics will transform the Volvo driving experience. Or make it markedly different from, say, Rivian’s, whose trucks also use Unreal Engine. OK, maybe the digital model of the C40 Recharge you see on the center display while sitting in a C40 Recharge will employ physically-based rendering and raytracing, so it’ll look damn near the real thing. And if you open the crossover’s actual lift gate, the lift gate in the model will open, too — conveying the same value of information as an instrument-cluster icon with a dumb LED behind it. It will be prettier though, that’s for sure.

One more point: Depending on how far Volvo plans to push the “photorealism” thing, this could all get quite resource-intensive. The automaker doesn’t say precisely which version of Unreal it plans to use, but Epic’s latest release is beefy to put it mildly, even for high-end gaming PCs. Then again, some manufacturers are angling to put full-fat GPUs in their cars, so maybe computing muscle won’t be an issue.