Unreal Engine 5 is finally ready to power a new generation of games

nearly a year of early access. Epic Games has officially The Matrix Awakens tech demo — UE5 can render extremely detailed scenes with more natural lighting than you might have seen in the past.

There are some behind-the-scenes improvements that should affect the games you play, too. It’s now much easier for developers to make open-world games thanks to systems that both automatically divide areas (to make them easier to stream) and let multiple developers work on the same region at the same time. There are new and upgraded tools to create models, animations and audio without resorting to external editors, and companies making videos or still images can generate very high quality output that would normally require a time-consuming offline renderer.

It will take a while for content to use the new engine. At best, studios have had less than a year to test the engine and start work on their projects. Even next Witcher game doesn’t have a release date. Still, the launch effectively sets the stage for the next wave of games PlayStation 5, S and the latest PC video cards.