Epic Games continues to actively improve the performance of Unreal Engine 5, and in the new preliminary version of Unreal Engine 5.8, developers have made another important step in this direction. One of the main innovations was a new version of Lumen technology, designed for stable 60 fps even on portable gaming systems.
According to the official description, the “Lumen Medium Quality” mode uses so-called “Light Fields” and “Occlusion Probing” for global illumination. The new variant turned out to be about twice as fast as “Lumen High Quality”, which is aimed at 60 fps on PlayStation 5. At the same time, Epic claims that the technology preserves the artistic style of games that actively use global illumination.
This looks especially important against the backdrop of the growing popularity of portable devices. Epic directly indicates that the new mode will become standard for the current generation of portable consoles and is also supported on PC. The most obvious candidate here is the Nintendo Switch 2, for which modern games on Unreal Engine 5 have had to be heavily cut down until now. Many projects could not simultaneously use key engine technologies such as Lumen and Nanite.
Now the situation may change. The lightweight version of Lumen, along with additional optimizations, will allow developers to port games to Switch 2 with far fewer compromises in graphics and performance.