Unreal Engine 5 is now available in Preview

Epic is currently working towards the final shipping version, with all features that it intends to include now ready for testing. In addition to many improvements to previously exposed tools like Nanite, Lumen, One File Per Actor, World Partition, and MetaSounds, you’ll find some new animation tools, groundwork support for Large World Coordinates.

Unreal Engine 5 Early Access was focused on exposing new features for next-gen game, visualization and 3d environment development. 

Nanite

Nanite is UE5’s new virtualized geometry system that enables you to create games and worlds with massive amounts of geometric detail. In this release, there have been many improvements:

• Improved performance and memory usage of Nanite streaming in editor
• New error-based metric for Fallback Mesh creation (previously called Proxy Mesh)
• UX to batch convert assets to or from Nanite and perform on-disk data trimming
• Support for all view modes and usage flags, e.g. Shader Complexity view mode
• Per-instance selection
• Per-instance/Actor custom data

Lumen

Lumen is UE5's new fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system, designed for next-generation consoles.  There have been many stability, quality, and performance improvements, including:

• Full hardware ray tracing support, which doesn’t require distance fields or any other software tracing, and scales up to large worlds
• Improved Final Gather quality, especially visible on foliage
• Glossy reflections on translucency
• Translucency Final Gather, which improves global illumination quality on translucency
• Landscape support

Virtual shadow maps

This new shadow mapping method delivers consistent, high-resolution shadowing. Virtual Shadow Maps are specifically designed to work well with highly detailed film-quality Nanite assets and large, dynamically lit open worlds.

Enhancements in this release include:

• Overall stability and performance improvements
• Improved handling of shadow invalidation due to moving/deforming meshes
• Support for more non-Nanite mesh types
• Support for more material types for foliage (two-sided, subsurface)

Path Tracer

Introduced in Unreal Engine 4.27, the Path Tracer is a DXR-accelerated, physically accurate progressive rendering mode that requires no additional setup, enabling you to produce offline renderer-quality imagery right from Unreal Engine. 

More info on Unreal Engine 5 site.