Unreal Engine 5.5’s MegaLights allows devs to use "orders of magnitude more" light sources—even on older hardware

Ray tracing has been a revolution, and it’s steadily becoming the norm for triple-A games. To put it another way, it’s lighting tech you definitely feel the absence of should a rogue update take away the option. Well, lighting artists are rejoicing because Unreal Engine 5 has come in swinging with what could be the next leap forward to set screens ablaze (though hopefully not our rigs).

Revealed during Unreal Fest this week in Seattle, MegaLights is a new, experimental feature for Unreal Engine 5.5 that allows developers to play with "orders of magnitude more" shadow-casting lights than ever before without taking a costly bite out of performance.

Wyeth Johnson, senior director of product strategy for Unreal Engine at Epic Games, led the presentation, pitching the tech by saying, "Unreal Engine is at its best when users can express themselves without technical constraint. Like Nanite did for triangles, or Lumen for global illumination, MegaLights removes limitation in a whole new category: direct lighting and shadows."

Okay, but what does that mean though? Putting the not super illuminating name to one side, Epic’s snazzy live demonstration tours through a marketplace scene using 1000 light sources—so, that’s the 'Mega' bit then.

It may seem paradoxical, but the biggest win for painting with light in a game development sense is how MegaLights handles shadows; at first glance, the marketplace scene looks shiny enough but takes on a dramatic sense of depth when realistic shadows are turned on for every light source in view. Beyond these realistic area shadows, MegaLights are also movable and dynamic too, demonstrated in the live demo with a swarm of drones flying into view.

That’s great news if you have hefty hardware, but what about everyone else? What about optimisation? In a show of confidence from Epic, the MegaLights live demo ran natively on a PlayStation 5 console, with senior technical product manager Victor Brodin waggling the sticks of the DualSense controller. The sell appears to be MegaLights can run smoothly even on a base PlayStation 5 unit.

Del Walker, a senior character artist who’s worked on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, took to X to put it into context. He shared, "People often don’t realize how many games look amazing in development until we have to cut back on lighting to make them run on consoles. This is gonna next-gen your next-gen games."

For those making the most of older hardware, what’s possible in Unreal Engine 5.5 could well light up your world. But until I get my grubby little hands on a game that actually uses the tech, I’ll be watching and waiting in the shadows like a certain group of rockers from 2003.