Epic Games launches Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engine 5 is now available to download, Epic Games announced on Tuesday. The latest edition of the benchmark games development engine touts a new “fully dynamic global illumination” tool, plus a geometry system that allows creators to build games with “massive amounts of geometric detail.”

Epic announced Unreal Engine 5’s launch with a Twitch and Youtube livestream showing high-performance visuals and real-time rendering. Unreal Engine 5 will also use a new World Partition system that, Epic says, “changes how levels are managed and streamed,” by dividing up the game world into a grid and streaming only its necessary cells.

Grid View

• 
  
  
  
  A view of the Lyra “starter game” that explores Unreal Engine 5’s features.
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  Enemy NPCs in the Lyra “starter game” that explores Unreal Engine 5’s features.
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  Unreal Engine 5’s new Lumen lighting technology at work
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  Another demonstration of Unreal Engine 5’s new Lumen lighting technology.
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  The World Partition tool divides and optimizes how much of the game environment is rendered.
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  A city environment rendered in Unreal Engine 5
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  A street scene rendered in Unreal Engine 5
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  
• 
  
  
  
  Another streetscape presented in Unreal Engine 5
  
  
  Image: Epic Games
  

The biggest, newest technologies in the engine are Lumen, a lighting system, and Nanite, the geometry system. Lumen can deliver “believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry.” Nanite can bring “film-quality source art” comprising millions of polygons into the game worlds “all while maintaining a real-time frame rate, and without any noticeable loss of fidelity.”

Epic announced Unreal Engine 5 in 2020 and began offering its technology in preview form in early 2021. Unreal Engine 5 is available for games on both current-generation and previous-generation consoles, as well as Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows PC. Epic says Unreal Engine 5 was developed with forward compatibility in mind, meaning developers will be able to build their games in Unreal 4 and move them to the newest engine later.