Newly released Unreal Engine 5 will power the next generation of games

Gamers are seeking ever more realism when playing the latest games and the Unreal Engine has been a driving force that’s powered some of the biggest hits in gaming like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and more. Now, they’ve just announced that their latest incarnation of the powerful engine, dubbed Unreal Engine 5 is now available for download.

While it’s primarily of value for game developers, gamers will be the ones who will enjoy the next-generation games that will be powered by Unreal Engine 5 with the recent The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience demo on the PS5 being an example of just what the new engine is capable of.

What is Unreal Engine 5

For the uninitiated, Unreal Engine 5 is a set of tools and assets to create large worlds of photorealistic quality for games, movies, architecture applications and more. It’s not just limited to games as movie studios and other outfits that rely on photorealistic assets can use Unreal Engine 5 to create vivid, believable worlds.

Among the new updates for the latest Unreal Engine 5 include next-generation real-time rendering via Lumen – a dynamic global illumination solution that creates realistic scenes by adapting lighting on the fly such as changing sunlight in a scene based on the time of day rather than requiring designers to painstakingly create lightmaps from scratch and having to rebuild lighting.

Another addition to the Unreal Engine 5 is a micropolygon geometry system dubbed Nanite that offers film-quality detail by using millions of polygons while maintaining a real-time frame rate without loss of fidelity.

Another notable addition alongside Lumen and Nanite are Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) that offer realistic soft shadows with reasonable performance costs.

Unreal ENgine 5 also adds in Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a platform independent upsampling system that allows games to render at lower resolutions but with similar output pixel fidelity to frames rendered at higher resolutions for better performance.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for what Unreal Engine 5 is capable of. You can check out the original Unreal 5 release notes here for more in-depth details. To get developers started, Unreal Engine 5 is also offering two free sample projects, one being a sample of the city from The Matrix Awakens demo and the Lyra Starter Game. The Unreal 5 Engine itself is free to download with a 5% royalty if a game makes over US$1 million. You can download Unreal Engine 5 here.