Unreal Engine 5 now available in full

rockpapershotgun.com:

Unreal Engine 5 has finally released, after nearly a year of early access and nearly two years since its reveal (featuring that Tomb Raiderish tech demo). Having launched a few minutes into Epic Games’ State of Unreal event, Unreal Engine 5 is likely to be the basis of many a PC game over the next few years, in addition to a few in-development games that have already made the jump: games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Black Myth: Wukong.

It's even been publicly playable here and there, as in The Market of Light and the console-only, Keanu Reeves-starring The Matrix Awakens demo. In fact, we’ve already had the full Unreal Engine 5 game in Fortnite, which switched from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 as part of its Season 3 mega-update. Outside of some new destruction and weather effects, though, Fortnite maybe isn’t the best showcase for what the new engine can do.

Chief among Unreal Engine 5’s upgrades is its dynamic Lumen lighting system, wherein changes to direct lighting (light that comes straight from the source, like a torch) will automatically induce changes to the indirect lighting (light that’s previously bounced off surfaces). It works with geometry changes too, so opening a door to a darkened room will more realistically flood it with light.

Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite geometry system also sounds pretty tasty. It aims to let devs worry less about polygon budgets and more about hyper-detailed models and environments: much more higher-poly objects can be placed in a scene, with the engine maintaining high performance by dynamically adjusting how much detail is actually processed and rendered. Think of how current streaming tech can show lower-quality textures and models at a distance, then switch to higher-quality versions