Epic introduces major Unreal Engine 5 update that runs ‘twice as fast’ on Nintendo Switch 2

Epic Games’ latest version of Unreal Engine 5 has introduced a significant performance boost for Nintendo Switch 2, it says.

Unreal Engine 5.8 was released on Wednesday, ahead of Epic’s State of Unreal event in Chicago, and following a period of early access.

Along with various features, the full release of the UE5 update introduces a surprise new “Lite” version of its Lumen lighting system, Epic revealed, which it says will lead to significant performance increases in Nintendo Switch 2 games.

Lumen is UE5’s default global illumination and reflections system, which calculates light bouncing in real time, saving developers from having to ‘bake’ lightmaps into their game worlds.

According to Epic, Lumen Lite runs twice as fast as Lumen’s previous version, meaning that games that rely on global illumination can now “run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps”.

“LumenLight is designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost,” explained Simon Tourangeau, Unreal Engine’s VP of engineering, at State of Unreal.

“That makes Lumen viable where it wasn’t before, including on Switch 2. And that work is already helping drive further nanite optimization efforts for the platform.”

A few games built with Unreal Engine 5, such as Epic’s own Fortnite, have already been released for Nintendo Switch 2. With this latest update, players will hope to see more UE5 games ported to the console in the future.

Games that run on Unreal Engine 5 include Halo: Campaign Evolved, The Outer Worlds 2, Arc Raiders, and Black Myth: Wukong.

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