Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.1 and the promise is that the graphics engine will be much more efficient and robust. In case you don’t remember, this is the engine that will be used in the remake of The Witcher game and some rumors suggest that the Halo franchise should start to be developed with this software.
The information comes from the program’s creator’s website, which mentions some innovations, such as Lumen, which is the dynamic global lighting system. Likewise, elements like VSM and Nanite have received major updates. Nick Penwarden is Epic’s vice president of engineering and spoke about joining the graphics engine:
“When we decided to design Unreal Engine 5, backwards compatibility with UE4-based games was very important to us – it was nice to see developers share our thinking.”
Another important detail is that Unreal Engine 5.1 now brings so-called Virtual Assets, which serve to separate metadata from objects. In this sense, it will be possible for developers to load only the elements they really need throughout the project.
In general, the graphics engine has received updates aimed at making game development for consoles and PCs state-of-the-art. In addition, Epic’s idea is that this is the main choice by professionals working with games. It is even now possible to create game worlds with much greater detail.
This is because the World Partition tools have been updated so that they can support Large World Coordinates. Finally, rendering and streaming have less impact on the system due to new support for HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail).