Unreal Engine 5 - why switch from Unreal Engine 4?

Despite the fact that Unreal Engine 4 for a very long time pleased both developers and ordinary gamers, all good things come to an end. But in its place comes even better. We are speaking, of course, about Unreal Engine 5 - breakthrough engine, that is going to conquer the whole video gaming industry.

But is it really necessary to forget everything and learn from UE4 to UE5? Let's find out.

Features of the Unreal Engine 5

So the main advantage of UE5 is still the technology. For example, the same Nanite, that allows to use unoptimized assets right in the game. This greatly reduces the load on the artists. On average, you will save 50-70% of your time on content creation. All the work associated with low poly, normal maps and LODs are simply absent in the new generation of engine. But the overall quality and detail will not only remain, but also reach a cinematic level. This is a giant step towards increasing the speed of content production.

Nanite isn't the only one, because there's also Lumen, the second breakthrough technology. It's global lighting, which works in real time, and it allows you to illuminate objects with respect to re-reflected light. So, for example, a bulb lights up one wall, but that wall bounces light onto another wall and so on. This is roughly how lighting works in the real world. For a long time it was too expensive to recalculate this during the game, so the developers made light maps in the editor beforehand, and dynamic light sources always had a relatively small radius of action, and they did not affect all the objects on the stage. Lumen allows you not only to change the approach to lighting design, but also gives you the opportunity to create a completely new game experience. The simplest example is a realistic change of day and night. However, in addition to this, it will now be possible to influence the illumination of any room right during the game - depending on the intensity and colors of light sources, the presence of various blocking objects, and other factors.

This, of course, is not all the technology that distinguishes Unreal Engine 5 from Unreal Engine 4. Among other things we can highlight the vegetation. In version 5.1 it is calculated by abolishing the procedure of dividing objects into high-polygonal and low-polygonal. It is because of this vegetation continues to cast shadows even at a great distance. All bushes, grass and trees also remain equally three-dimensional, near or far. It may seem that you will have to sacrifice a huge amount of FPS for the sake of such features, but it is not so. On the contrary, the performance even increases.

That is, almost every new Unreal Engine 5 feature literally tells us that this engine is designed primarily to create full-scale AAA games with an open world. Even the recommended map size has expanded from 22 km² to 88 000 000 km² - that is four million times.

But even such a huge world needs something to fill. That's why we recommend that you take a look at our catalog of assets. Here you can find both 2D and 3D items for filling the game world. This may be the whole cities with low scaling as well as some local objects for refining of locations - for example, houses, trees, rocks, etc.

Why you should switch from UE4 to UE5

So, considering all the advantages of the new engine we can conclude that it's designed to bring the gaming industry to a whole new level. And it really should be switch to it with time. But the thing is that until Unreal Engine 5 is patched to a stable state, it will take at least a few years. You can use experimental versions, but any game with them will demand enormous resources from your computer.

If you're worried about having a more or less finished project on Unreal Engine 4, but want to port it to Unreal Engine 5, it can be done without any problems. Even Epic Games themselves are in the process of porting their hit game, Fortnite, to the next generation engine. We have ready templates (blueprints) for Unreal Engine 4 on our website. They will also work on Unreal Engine 5 if you eventually decide to port your game.

Other articles:
Unity: features, pros and cons
Unreal Engine 5 for professionals
Unity or Unreal Engine?