We've officially entered the Unreal Engine 5 era

pcgamer.com:

A «preview» version of Unreal Engine 5 has been available for a while now, but today it officially took Unreal Engine 4's place as the current Unreal version. We can expect new Unreal-based games to use it, as well as some in-progress games, such as Stalker 2.

What that means will vary depending on the game and studio. The 2020 tech demo embedded above shows off the updated engine's new «micropolygon geometry system,» Nanite, and its «global illumination solution,» Lumen. With Nanite and Lumen, Epic says that developers can import film-quality 3D assets with «massive amounts of geometric detail» and set up dynamic lights without worrying about certain complex technical steps, especially those to do with optimization. The engine handles the 'making it run on our PCs' part, or at least more of it.

There are some features specific to open world games, too, which may be useful for CD Projekt Red's new Witcher game; the studio announced last month that it's switching to Unreal Engine 5. One of those features is World Partition, which handles the on-the-fly loading and unloading of open worlds as players move through them. Another is Data Layers, which allow developers to «create different variations of the same world—such as daytime and nighttime versions, or intact and broken geometry—as layers that exist in the same space,» says Epic.

UE5 also includes new modeling and animation tools, «a fundamentally new way of making audio,» and other features meant to simplify the work of game development and keep as much of it as possible in the Unreal Engine development environment. In fact, using Epic's Quixel Megascans(opens in new tab) (super detailed environment models) and MetaHumans(opens in new tab) (realistic, customizable