Why should you care about Unreal Engine 5?

techcrunch.com:

Epic recently released the first public version of its Unreal Engine 5, a sprawling multi-tool development environment for games and other 3D content… immediately followed by a $2B investment from Sony and the Lego family. Why is a new version of a gaming development tool making such a big splash, and why should you care about it?

First, about the software itself. Engines are a general name for the tools developers use to create and manipulate the visuals, sounds, physics and other aspects of a 3D production, whether that’s a game, a film, or something less well defined like an augmented reality experience.

Not that ago you might make your 3D models in one program, animate them in another, create the sounds in yet another, and then do the same for game logic, lighting, physics, and a dozen other aspects of what you’re building. Over time game engines have grown to encompass more and more of this process in one place, though specialty tools are often better at any one given aspect.

Unreal Engine 5 (often abbreviated to UE5) is the most capable and integrated engine yet, putting high-end graphics and visual design together with audio, lighting, animation, and other capabilities.

In particular, UE5 allows for much improved graphical fidelity by removing the need for developers to separately define how an object is lit, by substituting a universal lighting engine, and the level of detail visible, by dynamically scaling down the highest fidelity model. These alone make up a large amount of the work of making a game look good; dynamic lighting takes a lot of work to pull off, and designers often have to make several versions of every object and character with varying levels of detail.

Screenshot from the Unreal 5 City demo