Speaking of the existing tools, one of the update’s highlights is the improvement of UE5’s most notable features – Nanite and Lumen. According to the release notes shared by Epic, the former now delivers faster performance for materials with masking, including foliage, and offers a more extensive range of surface representation thanks to the new Explicit Tangents option. The latter with Hardware Ray Tracing has expanded capabilities, such as support for multiple reflection bounces and improved performance on consoles.

Other areas with noteworthy advancements include Virtual Shadow Maps, which are now production-ready, along with improvements to Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), Hair Grooms, Path Tracing, and Substrate.