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Unreal Engine 5.8

Stable

Epic Games, released Jun 17

MegaLights, Movie Render Graph and Iris replication reach production-ready; Lumen Lite arrives in beta; Mesh Terrain and other worldbuilding tools debut as experimental.

Highlights

  • MegaLights is production-ready
  • Lumen Lite global illumination (beta)
  • Mesh Terrain (experimental)
  • Control Rig Physics moves to beta

Changelog

Breaking changes4

  • Windows audio: WASAPI is now the default backend (XAudio2 remains an opt-in fallback)
  • Zenserver as cooked output store is now on by default
  • Zenserver: AllowRemoteNetworkService config key renamed to RemoteNetworkService
  • OpenXR: stereo layer ordering now follows layer priority

New10

  • Lumen Lite (beta): medium-quality global illumination, described by Epic as twice as fast as Lumen high quality
  • Mesh Terrain (experimental)
  • Fast Geometry Streaming (experimental)
  • Procedural Vegetation Editor (experimental)
  • Substrate NPR shading (experimental)
  • Direct Mesh Controls for Control Rig (experimental)
  • MetaHuman Animator single-camera body capture (experimental)
  • Unreal MCP Server plugin (experimental)
  • Fog Screen Space Scattering (experimental)
  • Audio Subtitles (beta)

Improved8

  • MegaLights: now production-ready, with froxel-based translucency and new debugging tools
  • Movie Render Graph: now production-ready
  • Iris replication: now production-ready
  • Mutable and Chaos Cloth: production-ready
  • Control Rig Physics: moves to beta
  • IK Retargeter: adds Retarget Override Sets
  • Mobile renderer: defaults to multi-pass deferred rendering
  • Editor: redesigned gizmo system and new Sandboxes for experimenting without affecting the main project

Deprecated or removed2

  • Audio: QueueSubtitle is deprecated in favor of Audio Subtitles
  • NNE: the NPU execution interface is dropped from the NNERuntimeORTDml runtime

Before you upgrade

  • To keep XAudio2, set AudioMixerModuleName=AudioMixerXAudio2 in the [Audio] section of Config/Windows/WindowsEngine.ini.
  • Projects that had Zen disabled must enable it manually.
  • To restore pre-5.8 OpenXR layer order, set xr.OpenXRSortFaceLockedLayersAboveOtherLayers=1 and lower xr.OpenXRProjectionLayerPriority.

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