On April 5th, Epic Games released Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the company’s video game development toolset. This engine features a brand new “fully dynamic global illumination” tool as well as a geometry system that allows creators to build “massive amounts of geometric detail” in their games.
The launch of Unreal Engine 5 was announced during a live-stream hosted by Epic Games on both Twitch and YouTube. During this broadcast, the company showed off the engine’s real-time rendering capabilities and high-performance visuals.
This development engine has a fully dynamic global illumination tool known as Lumen and a geometry system called Nanite. It also comes equipped with a new World Partition system that “changes how levels are managed and streamed,” Epic explained, by dividing virtual worlds into a grid and streaming only the necessary cells.
This has been a long time coming since Epic first announced it would be launching Unreal Engine 5 back in 2020. This software is available on current generation and next-gen consoles plus Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows devices.
The Profit‘s Take:
This looks INCREDIBLY realistic. I am excited to see some of the non-gaming uses that this tool has to offer. Some of the photo-realistic stuff that was being rendered in real-time was INSANE. I would love to see Tim Sweeney lean into Unreal Engine much more! We need one less concert in Fortnite, and more Unreal Engine innovation so that we can move further into the metaverse. It’ll be exciting to see what people create with this.
(All information was provided by Polygon)
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