Over the past few months, Epic has been hard at work addressing the performance issues seen in previous versions of Unreal Engine 5, and the work is far from complete. Unreal Engine 5.8, whose preview version was released a few days ago, continues to prioritize performance advancements, moving MegaLights into full production and testing a new Lumen mode that sounds extremely promising on paper, targeting 60 FPS on all gaming systems, handhelds included.
"Lumen now supports medium quality Global Illumination using Irradiance Fields with Probe Occlusion," reads the Lumen Medium Quality official description on the public roadmap for version 5.8. "It's twice as fast as Lumen high quality - which targets 60fps on PlayStation 5, while maintaining the art direction for games that rely on Global Illumination. This path is the new default for current gen handheld consoles, where it can be used at 60fps and is supported on PC as well."
Needless to say, this is huge for a few reasons. While handheld gaming devices represent a limited portion of the total PC audience, the Nintendo Switch 2 is set to become an extremely popular gaming system (although the recent price increase could slow down sales), and the ports of Unreal Engine 5 games released to date had to be scaled down considerably, and none of them sport all of the core features of Unreal Engine, such as Lumen and Nanite, at the same time. The introduction of a lighter version of Lumen, alongside the optimization steps Nintendo developers could be implementing starting from Yoshi and The Mysterious Book, is likely meant to address this issue and allow games powered by the engine to run better on Nintendo's console without making too many compromises.
Lumen Medium Quality is only one of the features of Unreal Engine 5.8. Among the highlights of the preview version are:
- Mesh Terrain (Experimental): A novel 3D-mesh-based architecture for constructing massive environments that works natively with PCG.
- Procedural Content Generation (PCG) Improvements: Enhancements that allow for manual edits directly on procedural content while maintaining the underlying procedural logic, alongside several iterative updates.
- Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE) Enhancements: Significant updates that enable the creation of high-quality, biologically correct, Nanite-ready vegetation assets directly within the Unreal Editor, including the ability to import meshes from external DCC tools.
- MetaHuman Crowd Plugin: Tools to populate real-time worlds with crowds of MetaHumans, scaling from tens to thousands of characters, while allowing any human mesh to be transformed into a MetaHuman with simultaneous head and body conforming.
- MegaLights Production Readiness: A full production-ready release that delivers faster, cleaner, and more scalable lighting workflows with greater performance on current-generation consoles and handhelds.
More information on Unreal Engine 5.8 preview can be found on the engine's official website. A release date for the full, stable version has yet to be confirmed.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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