Page Text: Faster, easier, more efficient
Unreal Engine 5 gets a UI makeover!
With Quixel Bridge now fully integrated, you have drag-and-drop access to the entire Megascans library. It’s part of the new Create menu for acquiring content and creating and placing Actors.
To free up space in the viewport, you can now easily summon and stow the Content Browser and dock any editor tab to a sidebar. Plus, it’s faster to find the properties you’re looking for in the Details panel.
Nanite & Virtual Shadow Maps
Massively detailed
Create games and worlds with massive amounts of geometric detail with Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and a new Virtual Shadow Map system.
Directly import and replicate multi-million-polygon meshes while maintaining a real-time frame rate without any noticeable loss of fidelity.
These systems intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints.
Lumen
Dynamic global illumination and reflections
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflections solution that enables indirect lighting to adapt on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day or opening an exterior door.
With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; what you see inside the Unreal Editor is what you get on console.
Temporal Super Resolution
Quality or performance? Why choose?
Players of next-generation consoles expect frame rates of 60 fps or more on high-resolution displays, putting an enormous strain on rendering resources.
Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a built-in, platform-independent, high-quality upsampling system, enables the engine to render at much lower resolution but with similar output pixel fidelity to frames rendered at a higher resolution.
World Partition
Bigger, better Open Worlds
With Unreal Engine 5, a new World Partition system changes how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells.
Team members can now also simultaneously work on the same region of the same World, thanks to a new One File Per Actor system, while with Data Layers, you can create different variations of the same World—such as day and night versions—as layers that exist in the same space.
Characters & animation
Animation in context
With Unreal Engine 5’s built-in artist-friendly animation authoring toolset, you can iterate faster and more accurately, with reduced need for time-consuming round-tripping with DCC tools.
Quickly create rigs in Control Rig, then pose and animate them in Sequencer, or use new retargeting toolset to easily reuse existing animations.
You can even dynamically adjust animations at runtime to compensate for different gameplay scenarios, such as varying speed or terrain.
Modeling
Asset development on the spot
In Unreal Engine 5, we’ve significantly extended and improved our modeling toolset, including mesh editing, UV creation and editing, and baking and mesh attributes.
With these tools, artists can develop and iterate on assets directly within the Unreal Editor, saving time and reducing the potential for errors. In addition, it makes it faster and easier to work with dense meshes, such as those generated using photogrammetry tools or by kitbashing.
MetaSounds
Procedural audio design
MetaSounds is a high-performance system that offers complete control over audio DSP graph generation of sound sources, letting you manage all aspects of audio rendering to drive next-generation procedural audio experiences.
Analogous to the Material Editor, the system is fully programmable, bringing benefits such as dynamic data-driven assets, the ability to map game parameters to sound playback, huge workflow improvements, and much more.
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Sample Projects
Free UE5-ready sample projects
To help you explore all the new features in Unreal Engine 5, we’re offering two free sample projects for you to download. And for hundreds more free and paid UE5-compatible products, visit the Unreal Marketplace .
Lyra Starter Game
Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project built alongside Unreal Engine 5 development to serve as an excellent starting point for creating new games, as well as a hands-on learning resource. We plan to continue to upgrade this living project with future releases to demonstrate our latest best practices.
City Sample
The City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene from The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience was built. The project—which consists of a complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters—demonstrates how we used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5 to create the experience.