During its State of Unreal event in Chicago, Epic Games released the latest version of its flagship Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 5.8, with major performance boosts and Lumen Lite for Nintendo Switch 2. Lumen Lite, included with full release of Unreal Engine 5.8, brings significant performance gains in Nintendo Switch games thanks to various optimizations.
Lumen is the default global illumination and reflections system of Unreal Engine 5. Lumen calculates light bouncing in real time, allowing developers to focus resources elsewhere instead of having to bake lightmaps. Lumen Lite runs twice as fast as Lumen, allowing global illumination to run at 60 FPS on Switch 2.
Unreal Engine VP of engineering Simon Tourangeau explained, “Lumen Lite is designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost. That makes Lumen viable where it wasn’t before, including on Switch 2. And that work is already helping drive further nanite optimization efforts for the platform.”
Fortnite is one of the games built in Unreal Engine 5, and it will likely be one of the first to reap the benefits of the improved engine on Nintendo Switch 2. Epic Games also confirmed that Fortnite will collaborate with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Vampire Survivors, Control Resonant, and Phantom Blade Zero.
More details about Unreal Engine 5.8 can be found at Epic Games’ official announcement post.
