Unreal Engine 5 flexes its muscles in a new demo

The lighting and shading provided by “MegaLights” is impressive. (Image source: Epic Games)

About two months ago, developer Epic Games introduced the latest iteration of its Unreal Engine. Version 5.5 has been freely accessible for almost a month and a half.

In addition to a number of functions such as: Lumens Or MetaHuman Animatorthat have been improved, there is a completely new (experimental) feature that particularly stands out: MegaLightsthat of developers also as Nanites for lighting is referred to. You can find out what is behind Nanite and Lumen in the following article:

Unreal Engine 5 – Everything about technology, nanites and lumens

MegaLights is Epic Games with a completely new type of so-called Direct lighting (direct lighting) and shading in the Unreal Engine, which should make it possible to place orders of magnitude more dynamic lights than was previously the case. The description is somewhat reminiscent RTX direct lightingthat Nvidia introduced a few years ago.

At the same time, performance should not suffer. On the contrary: MegaLights should even be able to improve the frame rate. A current video from the YouTuber channel MxBenchmarkPC wants to prove this:

Link to YouTube content

In the first three minutes you can see comparison shots that compare software lumens, hardware lumens and hardware lumens plus MegaLights.

And it can actually be seen that, depending on the game scene, performance increases by up to 50 percent when using MegaLights.

But if you look closely, you will see that many details are blurred and the image quality is contrary to the title of the video (Unreal Engine 5.5 MegaLights Demo – Massive performance increase of up to 50% and better image quality) decreases sharply.

Does MegaLights also pay for the images per second it acquires through poorer display quality?

No, fortunately that is not the case. The YouTube channel must have made some mistake while creating the video. Later (from around minute 3:05) you can see how MegaLights actually works.

More FPS with a better look at the same time?

We looked at both the compiled tech demo and the underlying project Dark ruins a closer look in Unreal Engine 5.5.1. In the demo, MegaLights cannot be turned on or off via the options menu, but it is enabled by default.

In the UE5 we have the entire catalog of fine settings available to us. And MegaLights can be deactivated after a short search. You can get both versions here:

Game scenes with a particularly large number of light sources (dynamic lights) benefit from the enormous performance of MegaLights. We even measured 67 percent more frames per second (27 versus 45 FPS on an RTX 4090 in almost 4K resolution).

In areas with even more lights, the performance gain can be even greater. In addition, in our opinion, MegaLights make the image appear more lively and three-dimensional.

5:13

Unreal Engine 5.5: Epic presents the features of the new version

In scenes with few light sources, the performance gain drops sharply. We only measure ten percent more FPS and less.

How does MegaLights do this? Epic Games replaces the technology with several other methods for lighting and shading. They simplify rendering, so to speak, and thereby save resources.

MegaLights relies on (preferably hardware-based) ray tracing, but does not replace the previous approach to global illumination lumens. Rather, the two techniques work together. MegaLights takes away lumens but does some of the work, otherwise the performance gains would be inexplicable.

Doesn’t ray tracing actually cost performance? That’s right. In this particular case, however, it is likely that the otherwise complex rendering equation for realistic lighting and shading was simplified by a variety of (dynamic) light sources.

When can we expect the first games with MegaLights?

The technology is currently an experimental feature that is not yet fully developed. For example, it currently cannot handle semi-transparent materials.

It can also be assumed that it will take a few more iterationsuntil MegaLight’s finale arrives in Unreal Engine 5. Accordingly, games with support for the technology will still be a while away. We don’t expect to see MegaLights in action outside of tech demos until the middle of next year.