Unreal Engine 5.5 Released, Brings Major Performance Improvements to Lumen & Path Tracing

Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.5 to all developers. This new version of Unreal Engine 5 promises to be more efficient and performant than its previous version. So, let’s take a closer look at it.

Unreal Engine 5.5 packs improvements for filmmaking, professional applications, and gaming. So, we’ll be only focusing on the gaming improvements. After all, that’s what interests us the most.

So, UE5.5 comes with major performance improvements to Lumen and Path Tracing. According to the devs, Lumen can now run at 60 Hz on platforms for which there is hardware support. Epic was able to achieve this thanks to many improvements to the systems that underpin hardware ray tracing.

In theory, this should allow games to run better on the same hardware with this latest version of UE5. This is great news as a lot of UE5 games have struggled to run with Lumen at native resolutions.

Since there are numerous UE5.4 tech demos out there that use Lumen, I’m curious to see whether or not they’ll get a significant performance boost once they get ported to UE5.5. Now that would be a really interesting comparison video.

Alongside these performance improvements, Unreal Engine 5.5 also comes with Megalights. MegaLights lets you add hundreds of dynamic lights with shadows to your scenes without limits. For the first time, lighting artists can freely use textured area lights with soft shadows, Light Functions, media texture playback, and volumetric shadows. This could be a game-changer. However, it may also increase the CPU/GPU requirements of a game. So, I’m looking forward to seeing MegaLights in a game.

Those interested can download Unreal Engine 5.5 from its official website.

Enjoy the following trailer and stay tuned for more!

John Papadopoulos

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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