Unreal Engine 5 has officially launched

Epic Games has launched Unreal Engine 5. The company broke the news during its State of Unreal livestream today, and revealed the next-generation game engine is now available to download.

Unreal Engine 5 has been available in Early Access since May 2021. A "production-ready" version was then made available in Preview form in February this year.

Breaking the news, Epic boss Tim Sweeney said the engine has been "battle tested" in Fortnite Chapter 3, which launched in December 2021.

Epic also announced it will be releasing the city sample from its "Matrix Awakens" tech demo -- which was built in Unreal Engine 5 -- to provide a starting point for other developers to "make their own world, tell stories, and even build new games on top of this incredible digital city."

Since Unreal Engine 5 was first unveiled, Epic has explained how technologies like Lumen and Nanite -- UE5's respective dynamic global illumination solution and virtualised micropolygon solution -- will allow developers to create games with "unprecedented amounts of geometric detail."

The company has also waxed lyrical about its distance-based streaming solution, World Partition, which aims to simplify the large-world creation process by changing how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells.

Epic claims technologies like those alongside a redesigned UI, new animation and modelling tools that allow creators to fine-tune and iterate on content in context, and more will help Unreal Engine 5 developers "put creativity first."

You can find out more about the launch of Unreal Engine 5 by catching up on the livestream below.