Epic introduced Unreal Engine 5.8 as a technology that provides even greater performance gains than UE 5.7, where performance increased by approximately 25% under GPU load and 35% under CPU load.
The Lumen global illumination system received a Lumen Lite mode. As Epic stated, it is so well optimized that it is suitable even for less powerful hardware, "such as Switch 2".
Lumen Lite is twice as fast as Lumen High Quality. This means that games with global illumination can run on Switch 2 at 60 frames per second. This mode is also available on PC.
Another important change was improved shader caching on PC. It should reduce compilation time and minimize micro-stutters.
UE 5.8 also introduced an experimental Mesh Terrain feature. It allows for faster creation of game location geometry, providing high-quality visuals with minimal performance costs.
Unreal Engine 5.8 tools are available to developers via GitHub.