Epic Makes Unreal Engine 5 Early Access Version Available

Liam Alexander 26 May 2021

Unreal Engine has long been one of the pillars of the gaming industry. The fourth version became the engine for many cult games by both Epic and third-party development, but it’s time to move ahead. Today Epic Games pre-released Unreal Engine 5. Its Early Access version is available for download via Epic Games Store. The engine comes with a sample project that’s 100 GB in size.
 
The audience of this engine is first of all game developing community. Game developers keeping track of the industry news will gladly start exploring the engine with its current possibilities (quite impressive). The new features include much spoken about Nanite, the new virtualized geometry system that optimizes the processes and renders a much smoother and better picture with less resources needed. It’s achieved through focusing only on details that can be seen by the player, skipping the unseen parts of the scenery.
 
Lumen is the illumination and flections system of Unreal Engine 5 that takes lighting to a new level as well. It can process infinite light bounces, and the distance it’s able to cover is from millimeters to kilometers. It can be used with older versions of Unreal Engine, but it requires better hardware to function properly. 
 
As for system requirements, they are as demanding as you might expect. The new Unreal Engine is designed to make games for PC (of course, on hardware powerful enough) and next-gen consoles. The publishers will not have much to think about when deciding on the engine version. The official release is scheduled in (approximately) early 2022. By that time, there will be much more next-gen consoles in use, and even more when the first games with Unreal Engine 5 hit the markets. By the way, Epic offers free upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 for the developers who already utilize UE4.