This is a translation of the official article Unreal Engine 5 is now available
The wait is over — we are excited to announce that Unreal Engine 5 is now available to download!
With this release, we aim to help teams of all sizes push the boundaries of what is possible visually and interactively. UE5 lets you create the next generation of real-time 3D content and experiences with greater creative freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.
As you may have seen, the new game development features and workflows have already been demonstrated in Fortnite and The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience demo .
Meanwhile, although some major new features such as Lumen and Nanite have not yet been validated for workflows outside games — an ongoing goal for future releases — creators can continue using the workflows supported in UE 4.27. They will also benefit from the redesigned Unreal Editor, improved performance, artist-friendly animation tools, expanded mesh creation and editing tools, an improved Path Tracer, and much more. See the documentation for full details.
Major New Features
Next-Generation Real-Time Rendering
Unreal Engine 5 introduces groundbreaking features for rendering real-time worlds with remarkable high-fidelity detail.
First, there is Lumen — a fully dynamic global illumination solution that lets you create believable scenes where indirect lighting responds immediately to changes in direct lighting or geometry. Examples include changing the sun's angle as the time of day changes, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door. With Lumen, you no longer need to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures. You can create and edit lights in Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting that players will see when the game or experience runs on its target platform.
UE5's new virtualized micropolygon geometry system, Nanite, also gives you the ability to create games and experiences with enormous amounts of geometric detail. Import film-quality art containing millions of polygons — from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans — and place it millions of times, while maintaining a real-time frame rate with no noticeable loss of fidelity.
Virtual Shadow Maps (VSMs) are designed to work well with Lumen and Nanite, providing believable soft shadows at manageable performance costs. Nanite and VSMs intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing polygon-count and draw-call limits and eliminating time-consuming work such as baking detail into normal maps and manually authoring LODs. This frees you to focus on creativity.
Next-generation consoles bring next-generation player expectations. Players want frame rates of 60 FPS or more on high-resolution displays, placing enormous pressure on rendering resources. With Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a built-in, platform-independent, high-quality upsampling system, the engine can render at a much lower resolution while producing pixel fidelity comparable to frames rendered at a higher resolution. The result is better performance.
A New Open-World Toolset
One of our ongoing goals is to make open-world creation faster, easier, and more collaborative for teams of all sizes. In Unreal Engine 5, the new World Partition system changes how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells.
Team members can now work simultaneously in the same area of the same world without interfering with each other's work, thanks to the One File Per Actor (OFPA) system. With Data Layers , you can create variations of the same world — such as day and night versions, or intact and broken geometry — as layers occupying the same space.
Finally, we have laid the foundations for creating truly massive worlds in UE5, without rebasing or other workarounds, through initial support for Large World Coordinates (LWC) , which use double-precision values internally.
Built-In Character and Animation Tools
Constantly switching to a DCC package to adjust and iterate on animations is time-consuming, tedious, and inefficient. Unreal Engine 5 lets you animate in context, reuse existing animations, and adapt animations to gameplay conditions at runtime.
A powerful new set of artist-friendly animation tools lets you work directly in Unreal Editor. Highlights include quickly and easily creating rigs and sharing them across multiple characters with the enhanced, production-ready Control Rig , then animating them in Sequencer. You can save and apply poses using the new Pose Browser , and apply blended keys with undershoot or overshoot using the Tween tool .
When time matters, why reinvent the wheel? UE5's new retargeting toolset lets you quickly and easily reuse and extend existing animations. With IK Retargeter , you can transfer animations between characters with different skeletons and proportions. For example, you can even retarget a human animation to a wolf. IK Rig also lets you make additive adjustments to a character's animation, such as keeping an animated character looking at a target.
Several new features let you adjust animations at runtime for different gameplay scenarios, such as different speeds or terrain, to improve believability and immersion. Motion Warpinglets you dynamically adjust a character's root motion to align with different targets — for example, vaulting over walls of different heights — using a single animation. You can also use Distance Matching to control an animation's playback rate, and/or Pose Warping to dynamically adjust the pose to better match the character's in-game movement.
In-Editor Modeling, UV Editing, and Baking
Animation is not the only area where you can spend less time switching to a DCC package. UE5 greatly expands and improves the tools for mesh modeling, UV editing, and baking. Together, they provide a powerful workflow for developing and refining assets in Unreal Editor. These tools are particularly useful for dense meshes, including those created with photogrammetry tools such as RealityCapture or by kitbashing Quixel Megascans.
A broad range of new and improved tools for mesh creation and editing represents a major step forward. These updates, which also include multiple improvements to core modeling and sculpting and remeshing and simplification, are supported by architectural advances that establish a framework for future tools. Watch this space!
We have also substantially updated and expanded the UV editing toolset. The new UV Editor panel supports laying out, selecting, transforming, cutting, and sewing UVs in 2D space; viewing, copying, adding, and removing UV channels; automatic unwrapping; and 3D previews with a checker or custom material. Project UV and Auto UV have also been improved.
Last but not least, the baking and mesh attributestoolset has been greatly expanded. New baking tools improve normal, ambient occlusion, and vertex baking. Multisampling, texture filtering, UV layers, and N-to-1 baking are also key features of the updated toolset.
Improved Editor UI and Workflows
It is time for a new look! Unreal Engine 5 features a modern appearance, streamlined workflows, and better use of screen space, making it easier, faster, and more satisfying to use.
With Quixel Bridge now fully integrated , you have direct drag-and-drop access to the entire Megascans library without separate download steps. It is part of the new Create List , which provides one place to obtain content and create and place Actors. Easy drag-and-drop workflows and one-click access to recently used Actors make populating a scene faster and easier.
To free up more space for viewport interactions while keeping tools and content close at hand, we have added the ability to easily summon and hide the Content Browser with a hotkey or button, and dock any editor tab in a collapsible sidebar.
You can also find the properties you need more quickly in the Details Panel , using a favorites system that keeps frequently used properties at the top of the panel, and a Section Bar that gives one-click access to related groups of properties.
Finally, there is a faster, easier workflow for creating new projects from a single unified screen.
A Fully Procedural Audio Engine
UE5 introduces an entirely new way to create audio. MetaSounds is a high-performance system that gives you complete control over the creation of audio DSP graphs for sound sources. It lets you manage every aspect of audio rendering to power next-generation procedural audio experiences.
MetaSounds is analogous to a fully programmable material and rendering pipeline. It brings audio the benefits of procedural content creation that the Material Editor brings to shaders: dynamic data-driven assets, the ability to map game parameters to audio playback, major workflow improvements, and much more.
Stunning Final-Pixel Imagery
Introduced in Unreal Engine 4.27, the Path Tracer is a progressive, physically accurate, DXR-accelerated rendering mode that requires no additional setup. For still images or linear content, it lets you produce offline-renderer-quality imagery directly in Unreal Engine in a fraction of the time.
In Unreal Engine 5, the Path Tracer improves stability , performance, and feature completeness , including support for hair primitives and the eye shading model , as well as improvements to sampling, BRDF models, light transport, supported geometry, and more.
And There Is More!
These are just a few highlights of Unreal Engine 5. See the release notes for all new features and improvements.
Some features are experimental and should not be considered production-ready. See the release notes for details.
To help you explore the new features in Unreal Engine 5, we are providing two free sample projects to download.
Lyra Starter Game
Lyra Starter Game is a sample game project developed alongside UE5 to provide an excellent starting point for creating new games and a practical learning resource. We plan to keep upgrading this living project in future releases to demonstrate our latest practices.
City Sample
City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene was built for The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience . The project includes an entire city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters. It demonstrates how new and improved Unreal Engine 5 systems were used to create the experience. In addition to the full sample, the content is available in separate packs, so you can download just the vehicles, for example.
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