Need for Speed 3 in UE5 is Awesome!

I’m a big fan of the old Need for Speed games, and while I admit the modern ones are a bit weak, back in the PlayStation 1 days, Need for Speed was king. I’d love to see them remastered, but now, I no longer need to wonder what that may look like. Dávid Kerekes has taken Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit and ported the assets into Unreal Engine 5.

What’s amazing is that they chose to keep the original textures and 3D models from the game and then use the power of Unreal Engine 5 to layer on some kick-ass enhancements. So while you get the look of the original game, you get drastically improved lighting, shadows, ambient occlusion and sun rays, to name but a few. The performance is obviously silky smooth, but it’s stunning to see just how much a game can be improved with a revised lighting system and a resolution bump.

Kerekes imported two levels, Hometown and Atlantica, as well as one vehicle. The driving physics look great, but I suspect are taken from another source or created just for this demo. Either way, the video looks bloody awesome, check it out below. I hope to see them continue down this route, as I’d love a bit of an indie remaster of this game!

“One of my recent projects porting the old NFS3 Hot Pursuit (1998) levels into UE5. For the 3D conversion I used various NFS modding tools and some Houdini and Python. I barely started working on it. The current “working” levels: Hometown Atlantica” – YouTube

If that’s not enough, someone is remaking Need for Speed Underground 2 in Unreal Engine 4 too, nice!