Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen Completely Transforms the Visuals of Satisfactory

wccftech.com:

Yesterday, Swedish developer Coffee Stain Studios released Update 8 on the Experimental branch of its highly successful factory building game Satisfactory, upgrading the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. This effectively makes it the first third-party game to support UE5, just ahead of today's release of Layers of Fear.

The engine upgrade comes with a lot of technical improvements, taking advantage of the World Partitioning system to improve level streaming and reduce hitches while traversing the open world, exploiting the Chaos physics simulation system to drive vehicles, adding Unreal Engine 5's own Temporal Super Resolution upscaling, and even converting part of the game's content (specifically Rocks, Cliffs, and Conveyor items) to support the new Nanite virtual geometry system.

However, by far the most impactful change from a visual standpoint is the switch to Unreal Engine 5's Lumen global illumination lighting. It is currently disabled by default (even when selecting the Ultra graphics preset) because of the increased strain on performance, though you can reduce that by disabling the Lumen reflections in the graphics settings.

That would still leave the high-quality bounce light system in place which, as showcased by YouTuber TotalXClipse in a comparison video between Lumen and the previous lighting system, is simply glorious. ResetEra user Lant_War also shared many comparison pictures; I've embedded them below.

They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but let's try to unpack it anyway. On the one hand, it is immediately obvious from the first image comparison that Satisfactory players will need to properly place lights in their interiors now since they won't be unrealistically lit as before. That