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Unreal Engine 5 Early Access (May 2021): Features and Requirements

In May 2021, Epic Games opened Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) to developers in Early Access, adding Nanite, Lumen and World Partition, with an official launch planned for 2022.

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Unreal Engine 5 Erken Erişim ve Sistem Gereksinimleri

In brief

AI summary

  1. In May 2021, Epic Games opened Unreal Engine 5 to developers in Early Access, with a video recreating Utah's red rock formations; the official launch was planned for 2022.

  2. Unreal Engine 5 adds Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry, Lumen dynamic lighting and a World Partition system that lets several teams work on one open world.

  3. Unreal Engine 5 recommends Windows 10 64-bit, a quad-core Intel or AMD CPU at 2.5 GHz or faster, 8 GB of RAM and a DirectX 11 or 12 graphics card.

Contents11 sections

Unreal Engine 5 Released in Early Access

After long development, Epic Games has opened Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the game engine it uses to make games with extremely realistic 3D animation and which includes many features and technologies, to developers in Early Access. Epic Games did not stop at opening Unreal Engine 5 in Early Access. To show off the engine's great graphics, it also released a video showing how a game world can be created, faithfully recreating a large part of the red rock formations in Utah.
Nearly 7 years have passed since the last game engine was released, and Unreal Engine 5, which will officially launch in 2022, has already become the company's most important technical achievement. We believe that after 7 years, Unreal Engine will blow players' minds.

Unreal Engine 5: New Features

Unreal Engine 5 brings new features that let game developers make a leap in visual fidelity. In addition to groundbreaking new features such as Nanite and Lumen, Unreal Engine 5 also includes significant improvements in designs used to create open worlds, as well as animation, audio and interfaces.

Nanite

Unreal Engine 5 Nanite demo showing highly detailed rock geometry

Thanks to the new Nanite virtualized micropolygon system, developers can create details and environments with an incredible level of geometric detail. Developers using Unreal Engine 5 get enormously realistic, high-resolution results without compromising on any detail, and thanks to Nanite they do not lose time on time-consuming tasks such as baking details into normal maps and hand-authoring levels of detail.

Lumen

Unreal Engine 5 Lumen lighting on a desert landscape

Lumen is a new feature that lets game developers create dynamic and believable scenes. With Lumen, you can easily handle the angle at which light falls based on the Sun's position, as well as direct lighting and geometry changes. Thanks to this feature, as the time of day changes, you can see shadows being drawn behind every rock in the scene. You can create and edit lights in Unreal Editor and experience the final lighting in real time.

Open World

Unreal Engine 5 open world landscape with a grid overlay

Epic Games says that when releasing Unreal Engine 5, one of its biggest goals was to make creating open worlds faster, easier and more collaborative for teams of every size. The new World Partition system in Unreal Engine 5 divides open world sections on a grid basis, allowing multiple teams to work on the same project at the same time.

Animation

Unreal Engine 5 character animation rig in the editor

Artist-friendly tools such as Control Rig let developers quickly build rigs and share them across multiple characters. This way, by posing sequence by sequence for movement, developers easily achieve natural motion with the new Full-Body IK solver. With Motion Warping, developers can dynamically adjust a character's base motion to align it to different targets with a single animation.

Audio

Unreal Engine 5 MetaSounds audio graph

With MetaSounds, Unreal Engine 5 gives developers full control over sound creation. While supporting developers in areas such as digital signal processing on audio sources, it lets users manage every aspect of audio processing.

Interface

Unreal Engine 5 editor interface with dockable tabs

Epic Games offers an improved user experience for game developers. Thanks to the optimized interface, developers will be able to open and close the editor tab whenever they want, and thus save workspace.

Unreal Engine 5 System Requirements

  • Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit
  • Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster
  • RAM: 8 GB
  • Video card / DirectX version: DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 compatible graphics card

Minimum Software Requirements

  • Your computer must have Windows 7 or a later operating system.
  • Your computer must be able to support the DirectX Runtime:
  • Your computer must have at least Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 or later. Visual Studio 2019 is preferred.
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