Epic Games has just released the next version of Unreal Engine 5, Unreal Engine 5.7. Unreal Engine 5.7 comes with lots of new features, including Nanite Foliage and an improved version of the Procedural Content Generation framework. So, let’s take a closer look at it.
The Procedural Content Generation system now makes it easier to fill your game worlds with content. It adds natural variety to make gameplay more fun and interesting while saving time. This update also brings improvements that help you create large, unique, and great-looking worlds more quickly and efficiently.
The new PCG Editor Mode gives you a set of easy-to-use tools built on the PCG system. You can draw lines, paint points, or create shapes to design your world. Each tool is connected to a PCG Graph, letting you control settings in real time, use it for assets, and even make your own tools for your project. Best of all, you can do it all without writing any code.
Unreal Engine 5.7 also adds Nanite Foliage. This is a new experimental system that helps render detailed plants and trees with great performance. With Nanite Foliage, devs can create large, realistic worlds full of dense vegetation that run smoothly on modern hardware.
Nanite Foliage uses Nanite Voxels, which can quickly and efficiently draw millions of tiny details, like tree leaves, pine needles, and ground plants. These objects look solid even from far away and run smoothly without sudden changes or glitches. Nanite Foliage also uses Nanite Assemblies to save storage and memory, and Nanite Skinning to make plants move realistically in the wind.
Another upgraded toolset is Substrate. Substrate is built into Unreal Engine’s lighting system and helps create beautiful, high-quality materials for all kinds of surfaces. It also works well on every platform, even mobile, making sure games look great and run smoothly everywhere.
MegaLights has also been upgraded from Experimental to Beta in this update. This feature lets you add many more dynamic lights that can cast realistic shadows, like soft shadows from large light sources. The update also improves visuals with better support for directional lights, see-through materials, particle effects, and more natural shading and shadows on hair. On top of that, performance is better, noise is reduced, and there’s less need to manually adjust light settings.
You can download and find even more details about Unreal Engine 5.7 on its official website. Below, you can also find a video that highlights its key features.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I'm not a developer and I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about but wouldn't it be smarter to fix older versions?
We're now on 5.7 and games that started developing a while ago on an older version can't really easily change to a newer version as far as I know.
is there even a released game that uses 5.5 or even 5.6?
I'm not a developer and I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about but wouldn't it be smarter to fix older versions?
We're now on 5.7 and games that started developing a while ago on an older version can't really easily change to a newer version as far as I know.
is there even a released game that uses 5.5 or even 5.6?
Borderlands 4 and Cronos are UE 5.5.
There are some indies out on UE 5.6: RV there Yet?
Think of upgrading difficulty as the difference between the Oblivion Remaster and, say, the Witcher 4: the Remaster only needs to recompile, and then someone checks if the rendering features or shaders changed. Pretty straightforward, because it isn't using Unreal for anything but the graphics.
The Witcher 4, however, has to worry about AI, combat logic, physics, quests, and so on, all of which are likely to be affected to varying degrees; and the more custom work had to be done on those things, the more difficult it gets to upgrade without breaking things.
So, sometimes it's going to be very easy, and the plug-ins won't really be a problem, and sometimes it will be an absolute mess that's only worth doing if you really can't fix people's hair, or performance is just unacceptable on foliage or something, because it will take a lot of effort to fix things.
While mostly true I bet CDPR were the ones pushing for these upgrades and doing most of the testing. They need to do that to get away from SpeedTree which is expensive to use and limits what can be modded in their games due to the licensing. SpeedTree licensing was the main reason it took so long for CDPR to release the Witcher 3 REDkit.
CDPR isn't just a developer using EU5 they are a partner with Epic now.
Outside of small indie titles, you're likely maintaining a custom engine build. Updating in such a case is never simple.
While the CDPR collab is driving a number of changes, I'd imagine they've already diverged significantly (they ripped out Unreal's streaming system for example). It's more likely that they just share developments on common concerns where UE-main integration, or vice versa, is viable.
The future is now
The future is slop!
Just 3 more patches and Unreal Engine 6 will be born.
"The Procedural Content Generation system now makes it easier to fill your game worlds with content. It adds natural variety to make gameplay more fun and interesting while saving time. This update also brings improvements that help you create large, unique, and great-looking worlds more quickly and efficiently."
UE: Spoiling devs, making them lazy and their games crappy.
Yeah – Devs first, gamers never – That seems to be "epics" vision for trash engine 5 – The easy to make screenshot and pre-render video engine, then when its the gamers turn its a slideshow engine
Duke Nukem –
"Just 3 more patches and Unreal Engine 6 will be born."
20 more by UE4 standards, UE4 went all the way to 4.27.
I'm actually seeing nothing much different than how other game engines evolve as well. MT framework engine had it's revisions as well.
Evolution of MT framework Engine https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8d3d29981655e1df1dc44270e6bc000ad0c53ea628955c4a1a80a281e063082c.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MT_Framework
Unreal Engine receives way too much hate for what other engines have been praised for the past decade now….
"I'm actually seeing nothing much different than how other game engines evolve as well. MT framework engine had it's revisions as well."
Not just game engines go through this but also software in general too. Games included. If there are any modifications made to the software it gets added to the change log and build revision counts upward. Which is mentioned at the top right or bottom of the screen in any game or software that boots up.
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techblaze is right though. Unreal gets way too much criticism over something that has been the industry standard for like ever. Unity, CryEngine, MTframework, Frostbite, and luminous engine all have done the same for build versions.
CryEngine got to 5.6 a whole year sooner than Unreal did. https://www.cryengine.com/
how come nobody mentions that?
ProcGen isn't anything new. Done right, it should just automate the tedious while not compromising art direction. How people use it, well, results may vary.
I really do hope UE6 isn't just further iteration with backwards compatibility in mind. They've hinted at significant changes, but I'm not sure we'd agree on what significant is. So much of the legacy code needs to be burned on a bonfire if it ever hopes to be a legitimately efficient engine.
Welcome to the shader's stutter world…
MegaLights, more like Gaslight. That thing creates fake lights, lowers the visuals, and that's why it bumps up the performance.
They're "real" lights, and ray traced – conceptually it's similar to RTXDI. It's a form of importance sampling – intelligently guiding and accumulating rays to get better results with fewer samples based on the importance of contributing lights.
The issue, like most things in UE, is heavily dependent on temporal filtering, which means ghosting. The caveat with "unlimited lights" is the cost moves from per-light to per-pixel, so expect further reliance on upscaling.
Make sure you dislike the video and report it as terrorism. Click the … button, then report then choose "promotes terrorism"
lol, what? why would you?
UE mutilates frame rate then it proceeds to terrorize gamers by giving them horrific fps.
How is it not terrorism? The only thing it needs is the star of david as a logo
That's a good one
They been claiming better performance this and better performance that… if that were true why do you need a 5090 to get descent fps in a cartoon game like borderlands 4 without employing dlss, mfg etc that causes shading and other such temporal issues. Their claims of improved performance at this point is about as much worth as a NULL – Almost all UE5 games had bad performance issues with very few and far exceptions, don't get why some still see the current state the engine is at is something good. Devs fault or engines fault… i personally find both lacking. Easy to dev, get screenshots and pre rendered vids… after that its slideshow time!
I'm playing a UE5 game that runs pretty good, 90+ FPS at 1440P Ultrawide with everything maxed out and no DLSS/FSR (not even available) But NASCAR 25 doesn't use any RT or Nanite or Lumen or any of that other frame destroying stuff. The night lighting at the tracks is still a little funky but they've already improved that somewhat.
There are exceptions but their way to rare, UE5 is at this point a label for caution, if the game is using its almost universally a label for poor performance.
The engine have really poor performance in some areas and devs and pubs naturally want to save money and what better way than grab an easy to dev engine and let the gamers PC do the heavy lifting while playing the games instead? To offset that lax work they use dlss, mfg etc as an excuse… the techs that were there to allow ray/pathtraced instead used as an excuse to make games cheaper to make.
I use DLSS Quality because it usually looks better than native TAA
Procedural Content Generation ….. Interesting how they went back to the old term for AI Content Generation because AI has gotten such a bad name with Gamers ….
Nothing like Corporate Propaganda ……
A polished turd is still a turd.
All the features to make UE easier to dev is fine. I want to see more optimization, and tools to help guide devs to optimize their titles. If somethings causing a pretty big bog down of the pipeline the engine should be able to point out where that is FFS, even if general ideas at first would be better than nothing.
With the advent of AI it should be able to help determine causes and offer some pointers. Mimic performance targets on subsets of hardware and give it an FPS you're attempting to ensure it can hit. "Was all fine and dandy till your model with the unnecessary poly's that no one can see weren't being culled correctly" would be amazing.
John, I admire you.
I don't know where you find the motivation to still write articles, when the gaming industry is completely dead already.
The video by Unreal Sensei explains and shows it better than anyone else, it's absolutely fantastic!
I've heard that Arc Raiders uses NvRTX, which is a version of Unreal Engine 5 modified by NVIDIA that has better performance (NVIDIA RTX Branch of Unreal Engine). Maybe Epic Games could learn a thing or two from NVIDIA?