Unreal Engine 5 is the new version of one of the most featured and impressive game engines in the video game industry. Thanks to Unreal Engine, all the content creators, video game studios, and many others will be able to take advantage of a brand new engine capable of creating breathtaking environments while giving you total control. Create easier, faster, and with high-quality standards. Be ready to be amazed by what Epic Games achieved.

What are the key features of Unreal Engine 5?

Epic Games understood years ago what truly matters when you want to build vast, wondrous, and breathtaking environments: time, production processes, and quality. That is why they created a new version of the Unreal Engine that focuses on speeding up content creation and integration into the Engine, procedural generation and physics, groundbreaking global illumination solutions, and more:

Nanite: Artists and content creators shouldn’t bother about if the Engine will be capable of handling complex geometry, creating LODs, or lowering quality. Thanks to Nanite, artists can now directly import film-quality source art from ZBrush to photogrammetry scans without caring about the technical aspects. The millions of triangles and geometries will be converted into virtual micro-polygons and cleverly streamed and processed to render only the details you perceive. No more useless and resource-consuming draw calls, no more hours of work creating normal maps to render elements, and no more manual LODs. Unleash your creativity, import, and you’re done.

Lumen: Lumen is new state-of-the-art fully dynamic global illumination and reflection solution of Unreal Engine 5. Thanks to Lumen, Unreal Engine can now render diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections, even in large and highly detailed environments. You no longer have to worry about authoring lightmap UVs, baking your lightmaps, or manually placing reflection captures. Add lights to the scene, even on the fly, and the Engine will seamlessly process it and compute all the global illuminations and reflection data.

Chaos Physics Engine: The physics engine features have been enhanced and extended. Improvements have been made on the body dynamic simulation (Rigid Body Dynamics); how animations can be built based on body simulation (Rigid Body Animation Nodes and Cloth Physic); destruction can now be performed dynamically in real-time with cinematic-quality levels. The destruction system also provides lots of control over fractures. Ragdoll, vehicle, fluid, and hair simulations also have been highly improved. Last but not least, you will be able to use physics fields to affect how the physics engine behaves at specific space locations. It can be beneficial to create custom physics depending on your needs. Note that physics fields can also communicate with all the other engine systems such as Niagara or Materials.

Niagra: Niagara manages all the types of particles effects, from firework to an insect swarm (yes, they can be considered as particles). Particles can now talk to each other and react to their environment like never before. You will be able to create complex and clever mass effects using Niagara.
Open world, more collaborative: Creating open worlds must be more accessible, frictionless with your collaborators, and faster. Unreal Engine now features a new world partition system that allows teams members to work together in the same region of the same world without overriding each other. In addition, you will now be able to work on different layers of the same area, creating different variations such as snowy and rainy versions simultaneously.
Animation: Create animations faster and seamlessly and automatically adapt your animations to the environment and gameplay. You can now create animations rigs faster thanks to tools like Control Rig, create them and pose them in the Sequencer to quickly create natural movements you will be able to apply to a large panel of characters. Procedural inverted kinematic has also been improved with the new Full-Body IK solver and the Motion Warping that allows dynamically adapting the character’s root motion to its environment.

MetaSounds: Audio will serve gameplay the best way possible. Metasounds is the new Digital Signal Processing (DSP) rendering graph that allows audio designers to control DSP through graph generation of audio sources completely. Thanks to the flexibility the new graph system works, audio designers can now take full advantage of all the benefits of procedural content creation to audio, dynamic data-driven assets, the ability to map game parameters to sound playback, huge workflow improvements, and much more.

A new editor workflow: A new version involves a new editor look that makes the whole thing easier to use. Indeed, you can now quickly summon and stow the Content Browser and dock any editor tab to the collapsible sidebar. That way, you will get more space for viewport interactions. A favorite system also has been included to let you quickly access your favorite properties and more.

Lots of supported platforms: You will be able to ship your creations on all the most used platforms including the 2022 next-generation consoles, current‐generation consoles, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch.

How to install and use Unreal Engine 5?

Installing Unreal Engine 5 is easy and can be performed in only a few steps:

Once you have installed and launched the Epic Games Launcher, you may need to update the launcher to the latest version. At the bottom-left of the launcher, go to ‘Settings’ and click on ‘Restart and update’.
On the main page, go to the ‘Library’ panel and click on ‘Engine versions +’, then select the latest version of Unreal Engine. A new version will appear with all the other Unreal Engine versions you previously installed. Next, click on ‘install’ on the version you choose, agree with the terms, select the engine location folder. The installation should start.
Once installed, you can either launch the latest version of the Engine by clicking on the ‘Launch’ button of this version, or you can click on the ‘Set current’ button on this version and then click on the big ‘Launch’ button at the top-right corner of the launcher.
The Engine will start, and you will be able to enjoy all the fantastic features of this stunning software.
Thanks to all the online resources and a great community, you will get used to using the Unreal Engine editors and features in a few time. No matter if you’re a programmer, an audio designer, an artist, or a filmmaker, you will find what you need to hone your skills and master the Engine.

Is it free?

Unreal Engine 5 is free to use and includes all the available features. Pricing plans depends on what you plan to do with the content you create:

Creator license: The Creator license is free to use and 100% royalty-free, so you can freely use it to create your own internal or free projects or to develop content or custom projects for clients, but not for publishing off-the-shelf offerings.
Publishing license: The Publishing license is free to use, but a 5% royalty is due if you monetize your game or have any kind of interactive off-the-shelf product and your gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000. You can find more information about royalties in the dedicated FAQ.
Custom license: There are other types of licenses where terms depend on your needs and your business. You can find more information on the custom license dedicated page.

What are the system requirements for Unreal Engine 5?

The requirements may vary depending on the features you’ll use. For example, look at the Lumen Platform Support section of this page.

Operating system: Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or higher.
Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster processors.
Memory: +8GB, 16 GB and you will be okay in almost any scenario.
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1070 or greater (software ray-tracing) and NVIDIA RTX-2000 series and higher, or AMD RX-6000 series and higher (hardware ray tracing, Windows 10 with DirectX 12 support) - DirectX 11 or DirectX 12.
Storage: 15 GB.