Unreal Engine 5 launches for next-gen consoles and PCs

Epic Games announces that Unreal Engine 5 has been released. 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

Lumen is a lighting and Nanite are the latest technologies. 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 unveiled Unreal Engine 5 in 2020, and started offering the technology as a preview in 2021. Unreal Engine 5 can be used on current-generation and older-generation consoles as well as Android and iOS as well as Windows, Mac and Windows PC. Epic claims that Unreal Engine 5 has forward compatibility, which means developers can build games in Unreal 4 then move to the new engine.