Unreal Engine 5.8 just got a faster Lumen for Nintendo Switch 2

With so many developers and publishers looking to bring their games to Nintendo Switch 2, Epic Games has announced that Unreal Engine 5.8 has a new version of it sLumen global illumination system specifically intending to target the Switch 2 and enable better support for 60fps gaming.

Lumen was one of the key incoming features for Unreal Engine 5 at the start of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S generation, providing dynamic real time global illumination and reflections via ray tracing. As with all ray-tracing, it’s a high-end process that has often drawn criticism from gamers for the performance cost and its implementation, but Epic has continued to work at streamlining and improving it over the past half decade.

Now, with more developers looking to the Nintendo Switch 2 and wanting to bring their PS5 and Xbox Series X|S games to the system, Epic has developed Lumen Lite. This aims to have a lower GPU cost by using irradiance fields with probe occlusion, and is specifically intended for use with Switch 2, though it is also supported with PC.

What does that actually mean? Well… it’s something to do with all of these floating balls.

This means there’s now a fistful of rendering presets and targets for developers to use:

• Cinematic scalability level targets Movie Render Queue.
• Epic scalability level targets a 30 fps console budget.
• High scalability level targets a 60 fps console budget.
• Medium scalability level targets 60 fps on Switch 2 and medium spec PC.
• Low scalability level disables Lumen features.

This isn’t the only thing featured in Unreal Engine 5, with MegaLights now ready for use to allow for placing many more dynamic lights within scenes at high visual fidelity. There’s also Audio Insights, Dataflow for Chaos Cloth, Live Link Hub, Iris, and Movie Render Graph.

Epic has also revealed a new experimental feature, Mesh Terrain, which allows for much faster terrain generation and combinations.

And the work continues to fight against shader compilation times, improving deduplication to avoid redundant work, which has cut Fortnite’s shader count by 68%.

Unreal Engine 5.8 is planned to be the final major update to UE5, with Epic shifting their attentions to Unreal Engine 6, which was announced with Rocket League’s revamp, and will bring a number of major new development features, like integrating AI use into the development tools.

Source: Epic

Tags: Nintendo Switch 2, Unreal Engine 5