Since its announcement in 2020, Unreal Engine 5 has already gained a lot of following, including some PlayStation studios (Firesprite, Haven) and a large part of Xbox studios (Rare, The Coalition, Ninja Theory, Double Fine, Obsidian, InXile, Undead labs). From the ambitious MMO Ashes of Creation to the upcoming Dragon Quest XII to Crystal Dynamics’ next Tomb Raider and the recent big announcement of CD Projekt, which decided to ditch its internal technology in favor of Epic Games’ tools for The next The Witcher , the next generation of the Unreal Engine, should be at least as important as the previous one, even if others want to stay true to their proprietary technology. This is the case of Remedy and its Northlight engine, Capcom with its RE Engine, or Bandai Namco, which is developing its future reference engine.
Aside from its still cross-platform orientation, the new Unreal Engine’s arguments for remaining a minor favorite of many studios include features such as Lumen, a fully dynamic global lighting solution intended to make it easier to understand the many intricacies of support lighting technologies. scene, or Nanite, a new system for directly importing movie-quality images composed of millions of polygons (ZBrush sculptures, photogrammetry scans) without noticeable loss of fidelity or fluidity.
The engine also features its own oversampling solution to meet the demands of players who don’t want to compromise on image quality or game smoothness in increasingly demanding games. Like DLSS with NVIDIA and FSR with AMD, Unreal Engine 5’s super temporal resolution (TSR) therefore allows the engine to render at a much lower resolution (e.g. 1080p instead of 4K), but with a result similar to is with a view and with better performance.
In the world of AAA, Unreal Engine often rhymes with open world and the UE5 has no intention of letting go of this image. The engine therefore includes the necessary tools to make creating open worlds faster and easier for teams of all sizes. †With Unreal Engine 5, a new world partition system changes the way levels are managed and broadcast, automatically dividing the world into a grid and broadcasting the necessary cells“, we can read in particular.
The developer documentation also highlights new features in animation or sound. The engine interface has also been modernized, not to mention that developers will have access to applications such as Quixel Megascans and MetaHuman Creator, purchases made by Epic Games that will provide services to creators looking for realistic characters and settings.
In addition to the engine itself, Epic Games is also releasing two sample games for developers to mine as they see fit. The first resumes the city seen in the tech demo The matrix awakens and shows off all the features of the engine. The second is Lyra, an online multiplayer shooter that acts both as a launch pad for creators’ projects and as a hands-on learning tool.
- Also read | Unreal Engine 5 gives show with demo of The Matrix Awakens
