Unreal Engine 5.1: Teaser video makes you want to see upcoming game graphics

There are (soon) more and more next-gen graphics cards, but for games that also need RTX 4000 and RX 7000, it looks rather meager. Reason enough for Epic Games to further drill out its Unreal Engine 5.

What’s in the Unreal Engine 5.1?

The most important building blocks of Unreal Engine 5 include the Lumen lighting engine and the Nanite geometry engine. Here there in the Version 5.1 according to the changelog along with the Virtual Shadow Maps most of the improvements to ensure high refresh rates. For example, Nanite has been updated with a programmable rasterizer to allow for material-driven animation and deformation, according to Epic. This allows you to animate leaves blowing in the wind on nanite-based foliage.

It is particularly important to Epic that the Unreal Engine 5 can be used to create open worlds perfectly. This should not only be important for the cooperation with CDPR on The Witcher 4. In any case, the tools for open worlds will be further improved with UE 5.1. The new hierarchical LoD system for water rendering and streaming means large areas of water can be created with better performance and a smaller memory footprint. Character animations should also learn new things. With World Partition, even larger worlds can be created in the UE5.1. Improvements have been made to make teamwork more efficient and to ease the game development process. The Deformer, which is based on machine learning, can be used to create realistic approximations of deformation rigs from the rendering tool Maya, which are executed in real time in the UE5. There should also be improvements in the sound.

Unreal Engine 5.1: Teaser video makes you want to see upcoming game graphics
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Unreal Engine 5.1: Teaser video makes you want to see upcoming game graphics
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Source: Epic

Epic shows what the whole thing looks like in practice in a feature video worth seeing. Especially the futuristic city at the beginning of the video, which looks like the successor to Cyberpunk 2077, makes the graphic heart beat faster. But the other improvements are also impressive, including the Machine Learning Deformer, which optimizes character models. It will be interesting to see when the first games based on the UE5.1 will appear.

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