Unreal Engine 5 and its features: a professional's opinion

Unreal Engine 5 is, you could say, the most advanced and modern engine available on the market. But is it as good as they say it is? Isn't it easier to use already proven version in the form of Unreal Engine 4? Let's find out.

The uniqueness of Unreal Engine 5

On May 14, 2020, the developers unveiled a new version of the engine at a presentation. The two key technologies that were flaunted were Nanite and Lumen. According to the developers of the engine, they should turn our minds upside down and completely change the way we think about game development.

Nanite - what is it?

Naninte is a new way to interact with game models. Nvidia has had something similar in the past when they tried mesh shaders, but it doesn't come close to Nanite. It's a no-brainer that it all looks nice and high quality, but what is the "revolution"? To understand this point, you have to remember how models were handled in games before.

The most important task in the past was to optimize the game. The created project should run on as many devices as possible to get as much money from it as possible. And so Nanite does a great job with optimization. This technology is supposed to reduce the models' load on GPU and CPU without affecting the quality of the picture, but on the contrary - improving it.

Lume - what is it?

Many people have already heard all sorts of stories about raytracing. This system of dynamic lighting calculates ray trajectories the way they would move in the real world. Just fire up any modern AAA game with raytracing to see how beautiful these effects look. But it's not that simple. The thing is that in order to run this technology you need a really powerful video card that can deliver a sufficient amount of FPS.

And if it were just a matter of hardware power, it would have been solved long ago. The main stumbling block is that raytracing needs a lot of factors that need to be calculated in real time, even if the object is not in the player's field of view. The Lumen technology simplifies the approach to calculating rays, despite the fact that Lumen is essentially the same raytracing from Nvidia. But the thing about Lumen is that it cleverly bypasses the costly steps by rendering using a simplified system.

So, Unreal Engine 5 is a very remarkable and promising engine, we will see big games with it very soon. In the meanwhile you can download Assets for Unreal Engine 4 / 5 from our catalog and use it while making games.

You can also learn how to use the latest UE5 technologies for architectural visualization, learn about 3D game optimization techniques, and read about modeling and texturing techniques for mobile game projects.