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The Matrix Awakens (2021)

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Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres of three-dimensional (3D) games and has seen adoption by other industries, most notably the film and television industry. Written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms.

The latest generation is Unreal Engine 4, which was launched in 2014 under a subscription model. Since 2015, it can be downloaded for free, with its source code available on a GitHub private repository. Epic allows its use in commercial products based on a royalty model, typically asking developers for 5% of revenues from sales, though Epic waives this fee for developers that publish their games through the Epic Games Store. On May 13, 2020, Epic announced that their portion of royalties for games developed in Unreal Engine are waived until developers have earned their first US$1 million in revenue, retroactively applying to January 1, 2020. Unreal Engine 5 is scheduled for full release in early 2022.

It is popular among PC and console games with high graphics capabilities and is used for numerous games, as well as finding further use in filmmaking and other business applications.

Unreal Engine 5 was revealed on May 13, 2020, supporting all existing systems including the next-generation consoles PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.[110] Work on the engine started about two years prior to its announcement.[111] It was released in early access on May 26, 2021, with expected full launch in early 2022.[112]

One of its major features is Nanite, an engine that allows for high-detailed photographic source material to be imported into games.[113] The Nanite virtualized geometry technology allows Epic to take advantage of its past acquisition of Quixel, the world's largest photogrammetry library as of 2019. The goal of Unreal Engine 5 was to make it as easy as possible for developers to create detailed game worlds without having to spend excessive time on creating new detailed assets, allowing the engine software to handle these factors.[111] Nanite can import nearly any other pre-existing three-dimension representation of objects and environments, including ZBrush and CAD models, allowing the use of film-quality assets.[114] Nanite automatically handles the levels of detail (LODs) of these imported objects appropriate to the target platform and draw distance, a task that an artist would have had to perform otherwise.[115] Lumen is another component described as a "fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes".[115][113][116] Lumen eliminates the need for artists and developers to craft a lightmap for a given scene, but instead calculates light reflections and shadows on the fly, thus allowing for real-time behavior of light sources.[115] Additional components include Niagara for fluid and particle dynamics and Chaos for a physics engine.[111]

Unreal Engine 5 will retain the current royalty model, with developers returning 5% of gross revenues to Epic Games, though this fee is forgiven for those that release their games on the Epic Games Store. Further, Epic announced alongside Unreal Engine 5 that they will not take any fee from games using any version of Unreal Engine for the first US$1 million in gross revenue, retroactive to January 1, 2020.

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