Unreal Engine 5 is set for an early 2022 release

New features in Epics unreal engine 5 look incredible
(Image credit: Epic)

On the Unreal Engine 5 welcome stream today, Chance Ivey and Galen Davis of Epic Games treated us to a more in-depth look at UE5, which the company has announced is releasing early 2022, with early access available right now.

According to Epic, and many pages of documentation, UE5 is jam-packed with new features and workflows for game designers, developers and artists. Some new features include:

  • The Nanite geometry system, to help devs dump the time consuming processes of baking, and LOD mapping.
  • Lumen, for fully dynamic, in-engine lighting that'll negate the need to bake lightmaps and use reflection captures.
  • World Partition, which will automatically divide the games map into a grid for easy selection and streaming of portions for editing.
  • The One File Per Actor system, for simpler collaborative workflows.
  • Data Layers, which gives devs the ability to create different variations of the same world as layers.
  • A whole host of incredible animation tools like Control Rig, the Full-Body IK solver and Pose Browser, as well as Motion Warping.

While I'm here getting nostalgic over game development, and ready to get stuck into some early access worldbuilding fun, many of you might be wondering what this means for the future of games.

Virtual reality

(Image credit: Valve)

Best VR headset: which kit should you choose?
Best graphics card: you need serious GPU power for VR
Best gaming laptop: don't get tied to your desktop in VR

This is the birth of a new generation of game engine, the successor to one of the most popular today, Unreal Engine 4. It looks like it's set to make game design workflows more integrated, collaborative, user friendly and much, much faster. We'll hold them to that when the time comes.

For more details, you can head over to the Unreal Blog, or for an even more in-depth look, here's the Early Access documentation.

Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.

Read more
A screenshot taken from the 2025 Nvidia tech demo Zorah
Nvidia RTX 50-series and dev kit show that rasterization is old news and we're now firmly in the era of AI rendering
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor outfit locations
Epic talks shop about stuttering in games that use its Unreal Engine and offers solutions to the problem
A screenshot from the PC version of Avowed, from Xbox Games Studios
Unreal Engine often gets flak for games running poorly or stuttering, but as Avowed demonstrates, it's really about how devs use it and the pressures of time
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition graphics card
'Neural Rendering' could be the new AI-powered sorcery in Nvidia's next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs
Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card on different backgrounds
AI will be crammed in more of the graphics pipeline as Nvidia and Microsoft are bringing AI shading to a DirectX preview next month
Epic Games logo behind the Epic Games Store
Epic gave away nearly 600 million games in 2024, and it's 'not slowing down' for 2025
Latest in Platforms
Screenshot of Children of Clay showing a mysterious clay model
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 10, 2025)
discord
Brace yourself for Discord to get worse: Reports swirl that the company is in talks with bankers about opening itself up to shareholders
The Spy from Team Fortress 2 holds up a folder with an accusatory expression.
Steam users react ecstatically to update that lets them access their heaving game notes via the web, also it fixes Monster Hunter Wilds video recording
HasanAbi
Twitch streamer Hasan Piker suspended after saying Republicans would 'kill Rick Scott' if they really cared about Medicare fraud
Screenshot from Faceminer showing a PC desktop with several windows open
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 3, 2025)
PORTSMOUTH, UNITED KINGDOM - OCTOBER 20: A man smokes a cigarette while he looks at a smart phone screen on October 20, 2024 in Portsmouth, England. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
Meta says sorry for turning Instagram into a horror show of violence, gore, dead bodies, and other graphic content that 'should not have been recommended'
Latest in News
Man facing camera
The Day Before studio reportedly sues Russian website for calling infamous disaster-game a 'scam'
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam