Unreal Engine 5.8 delivers MegaLights and Lumen Lite with 60 FPS performance targets

Unreal Engine 5.8 receives optimised Lumen support with MegaLights and Lumen Lite

Unreal Engine 6 may be on the horizon (more info here), but that doesn’t mean that it’s over for Unreal Engine 5. Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 5.8, which should be the last major release for Unreal Engine 5. With it come performance improvements for the engine’s advanced “Lumen” technologies. This includes a new “production-ready” version of their “MegaLights” feature, and a new, faster “Lumen Light” mode.

With MegaLights, Unreal Engine 5 users can create scenes with many light sources to achieve more dynamic lighting and add more dynamic lights to shadowed areas. Unreal Engine 5.8’s MegaLights now delivers greatly reduced visual noise and features improved overall performance. With MegaLights, developers should be able to target 60 FPS framerates on current-generation consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series X). Epic Games has also added new debugging and optimisation tools to help developers to better utilise the tool.

MegaLights is now Production-Ready, empowering you to place a vast number of dynamic and shadowed area lights into your scenes—while now delivering greatly reduced noise to maximize visual fidelity.

MegaLights also delivers improved overall performance to achieve a target of 60 fps on current-generation consoles, new debugging and optimization tools designed to give you the confidence to place lights and embrace a truly dynamically lit world, and many further enhancements.

– Epic Games

60 FPS Lumen on Switch 2 with Lumen Lite

Unreal Engine 5.8 delivers Lumen Lite (Lumen Medium) mode, which is designed to significantly lower the GPU cost of Lumen. Lumen is one of Unreal Engine 5’s top features, and disabling it greatly lowers image quality. With Lumen Lite, developers can now utilise a version of Lumen that runs “twice as fast” as Lumen’s high-quality mode. This version is also optimised to run on Switch 2 at 60 FPS, and is supported on PC and other platforms.

With Lumen Lite, gamers with lower-end PCs and Switch 2 can enjoy the benefits of Lumen, albeit in a lessened form. It gives developers much-needed flexibility, as turning Lumen off has major performance benefits but also significant visual consequences. If nothing else, Lumen Light will help developers better utilise the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S. It also opens the door to faster performance modes for games on PS5 and Xbox Series X. PC gamers will benefit from this increased flexibility as well.

Lumen dynamic global illumination now offers a Lumen Lite mode, which is designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost by using irradiance fields with probe occlusion. Twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, it means that games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps. It’s also supported on PC.

– Epic Games

Lumen Lite will enable more games to utilise Lumen and use it more effectively on lower-end gaming platforms. While it does not match the quality of Lumen’s “High” mode, it offers a vastly better experience than the “Lumen off” option developers previously had to use on performance-constrained gaming platforms.

You can join the discussion on Unreal Engine 5.8 on the OC3D Forums.