Epic Games “Prioritizes Performance” with Unreal Engine 5.8 preview

Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available in preview

Epic Games has officially released its Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview, confirming that this new version of the engine “prioritizes performance advancements” for future gaming projects.

With this new version of Unreal Engine 5, Megalights will finally enter “production-ready” status. This feature now has greatly reduced noise, maximising visual fidelity. It also features improved overall performance to help achieve 60 FPS framerate targets. Epic Games has also added new tooling to help users debug and optimise their scenes.

A new feature with version 5.8 is Epic’s new “Lumen Medium Quality” setting, which is now in beta. This feature is a new medium Global Illumination (GI) mode that runs 2x faster than Luman’s high quality mode. It uses irradiance fields and probe occlusion. Note that Lumen’s high quality mode targets 60 FPS on PlayStation 5. This means that this new medium mode can help games target high framerates on handheld consoles or help achieve higher performance targets on other platforms.

Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview prioritizes performance advancements, providing systems that are more reliable, scalable, and intuitive to support all project requirements.

– Epic Games

Overall, this new version of Unreal Engine aims to help developers push for higher framerates while utilising the engine’s advanced lighting features. It also features new tools to help with animations, procedural generation, and more. Sadly, it will take a while for this update to have an impact on shipping games. After all, this version of Unreal Engine 5 is now in preview. It will be a long time before it is released. Furthermore, not all ongoing projects will shift to this new version of Unreal Engine 5. Changing engine versions is not an easy process.

More information about Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5.8 preview is available here.

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