In a rather vague link that gives us a reason to report on it, Epic Games has announced that Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available for developers. The “last planned major” update to this specific version of the engine, there’s a lot of technical jargon in here that won’t mean much of anything to the average person. Heck, I’m somewhat versed in these terms and I don’t even understand the full post. Still, UE5.8 brings a new version of Unreal’s lumen rendering technique that promises huge performance boosts for Nintendo Switch 2 games.
As the post outlines, “Lumen dynamic global illumination now offers a Lumen Lite mode, which is designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost by using irradiance fields with probe occlusion.” Epic claims it can render twice as fast as “Lumen High Quality,” which means games that rely on the technique should now be able to hit 60 fps on Switch 2. That would be a huge win for Nintendo’s system, especially since the ever rising price of hardware means that more performant next-gen systems are unlikely to release anytime soon.
If you’re not sure what lumen is or are reading the term for the first time, I’m not exactly the best person to explain it. Essentially, it’s a form of hardware ray-tracing that calculates light bounce from different surfaces. It’s used, primarily, to create diffused lighting, which is when light falls off after it hits a surface. Think of how when you’re walking down a sunny street, you might see the yellow of a brick projected onto the pavement if the sun is bright enough. That projection gets softer the farther away from the brick it is.
Obviously, there is a whole host of things added to Unreal Engine 5.8, but the update for lumen rendering is specific to Switch 2. There hasn’t been too many UE5 games released on Nintendo’s console yet, but this update should mean that any new games will run even better than before.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
