Unreal Engine 5 Announced with New Features, Coming in 2021

Epic Games today revealed the latest version of the game engine, Unreal Engine 5. Unreal Engine is the backbone of several of the most popular games in the world. It includes games likes of Fortnite, PUBG, and more. And also available on a wide variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, desktop, and consoles. It showed off a stunning tech demo, which was running on a PlayStation 5 dev kit. So, we just got our first glimpse of what next-generation gaming hardware is going to be capable of.

Unreal Engine 5 now takes things to the next level with the introduction of two new features that the company is calling Nanite and Lumen.

Nanite is an update to the geometry pipeline. It will significantly increase the fidelity of the geometry in a game. Also making it easier for developers to implement it. Developers can now import their ZBrush sculpts, photogrammetry scans such as Quixel Megascans or CAD data straight into the engine without having to optimize them. Nanite streams and scales geometry in real-time. So there are no polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw call budgets to consider.

Nanite

Nanite can crunch a large amount of triangle data per frame, where each triangle can be the size of a pixel. This high triangle count gives all objects in the game an incredibly life-like appearance without having to use normal maps. It also gets rid of things like popping and LOD distance as geometry can scale with the resolution and can be incredibly high fidelity even up close.

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Lumen

Lumen is Epic’s new dynamic global illumination tool. Epic says it will work in real-time for game development the way advanced computer-generated graphics work for high-quality animation and film production. “Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly,” the company explains.

You can see these technologies in action in the tech demo that Epic released today, which also happens to be running on a PlayStation 5. The demo features incredibly high-fidelity geometry with lifelike materials thanks to the use of Quixel Megascans being imported into Unreal Engine 5. It also showcases the moving bounce lighting with the new Lumen global illumination system. The demo also showcases techniques such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering that are found in the current version of the Unreal Engine.

Forward compatibility

The current Unreal Engine 4.25 already supports the upcoming Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X consoles. Unreal Engine 5 will only be out as a preview early next year. It will be fully released in late 2021, with support for next-gen as well as current-gen consoles. It includes PCs, Mac, iOS, and Android devices. Epic says it is also designing forward-compatibility. So games built on Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) can be migrated to Unreal Engine 5 when it’s ready.

Epic Games also revealed that Fortnite would be a launch title for the PS5 and Xbox Series X. The game will be migrated from Unreal Engine 4, its current engine, to UE5 in 2021.

Epic Games also announced the launch of the Epic Online Services. It is free for all developers to incorporate multiplayer services. Such as matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leader boards, and accounts, in their games. Epic built these for Fortnite and is now making them available for anyone to use, through a multi-platform SDK. Developers will have the option to use these services with their games, thereby opening up their game to over 350 million players and their 2.2 billion friend connections from the Epic Games accounts.

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Mithunraj Kurunthil

Hi, I’m Mithunraj Kurunthil, an aspiring blogger with an obesession for all things tech. This blog is dedicated to helping people learn about technology.