Epic Games Rolls Out Unreal Engine 5.7 Beta with Major New Tools

Epic Games has released the beta version of Unreal Engine 5.7, giving developers an early look at its key new features. One of the standout additions is the experimental Nanite Foliage technology. It allows for the creation of incredibly dense, detailed forests and fields without bringing your CPU or GPU to its knees. The engine efficiently handles the complexity of the vegetation, including wind animation, bringing the visual fidelity of projects closer to a cinematic level.

Another major step forward is the promotion of the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework to production-ready status. The tool is now nearly twice as fast as it was in version 5.5, giving creators a powerful way to automatically generate landscapes, buildings, and other assets, significantly speeding up the development of large game worlds.

In this release, MegaLights lighting now supports directional lights and particles from the Niagara system. The developers promise less noise and better performance. Also graduating to full production-ready status is the Substrate material system, which offers greater control over the appearance of surfaces, from metal to skin. For animators and riggers, the engine gets a new set of experimental tools that simplify working with rigs, enabling the creation of blend shapes directly in the editor and allowing for more realistic physical interactions between characters and their environment.

It's important to remember, however, that this is a beta release. Epic Games warns that the build may be unstable and recommends testing it on project copies, not your main work files. The full stable release of Unreal Engine 5.7 is expected later, but you can check out all the new features now via the Epic Games Launcher.

Despite the impressive suite of new technologies in Unreal Engine 5.7, using them effectively remains a challenge for many developers. Questions about optimization and performance in UE5 projects are a frequent topic of debate. Weighing in on the matter, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has stated that the cause of low frame rates often lies with the approaches taken by development studios themselves, rather than with the engine's capabilities.