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Unreal Engine 5 System Requirements

Unreal Engine 5 System Requirements

Unreal Engine 5 is the latest version of the Unreal Engine, a powerful real-time 3D creation tool for photoreal visuals and immersive experiences. It was released in early access in May 2021, and is expected to be fully launched in 2022.

Unreal Engine 5 introduces two revolutionary features: Nanite and Lumen. Nanite is a virtualized micropolygon geometry system that allows you to create and render massive amounts of geometric detail without compromising performance or quality. Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that reacts to scene and light changes instantly, creating realistic and believable lighting effects.

Unreal Engine 5 Features

Unreal Engine 5 also includes many other improvements and enhancements, such as:

  • World Partition: A system that automatically divides the world into a grid of cells, allowing multiple users to work on the same region simultaneously, and enabling efficient streaming and culling of large worlds.
  • Lumen: This dynamic global illumination system provides realistic lighting that reacts to the environment.
  • Nanite: This technology allows for the creation of incredibly detailed worlds with millions of polygons.
  • Data Layers: A system that allows you to create different variations of the same world, such as day and night cycles, or different gameplay modes, without duplicating any content.
  • One File Per Actor: A system that simplifies the asset management and collaboration workflow by storing each actor in its own file, rather than in a single map file.
  • Animation Motion Warping: A system that allows you to dynamically adjust the root motion of animations to fit the current context, such as matching the character’s pose to the terrain or aligning the character’s direction to the camera.
  • MetaSounds: A new high-performance audio system that gives you complete control over sound creation and processing, using a node-based authoring tool similar to Blueprints.
  • MetaHumans: A framework for creating high-fidelity digital humans in minutes, using a cloud-based app that lets you customize various aspects of the human appearance, such as facial features, skin tone, hair style, clothing, and more.

Unreal Engine 5 enables you to deploy projects to Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck.

You can download Unreal Engine 5 for free from the official website, or from the Epic Games Launcher. You can also access the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which is a special version of Unreal Engine 5 that lets you create your own Fortnite experiences.

Unreal Engine 5 System Requirements

The system requirements for Unreal Engine 5 depend on the operating system, the hardware, and the software that you are using to develop with Unreal Engine 5. Here are some general guidelines based on the official documentation1 and other sources:

  • Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit version 1909 revision .1350 or higher, or versions 2004 and 20H2 revision .789 or higher; latest macOS Monterey or Ventura; Ubuntu 22.04 or any reasonable new Linux distro from CentOS 7.x and up.
  • Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster; for better performance, you may want to use a higher-end CPU such as Intel Core i9 13900K or AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM (minimum), 64 GB RAM (recommended); more RAM will help with loading large worlds and assets faster.
  • Internal storage: 256 GB SSD (recommended); SSDs will improve the loading speed and responsiveness of the engine and editor.
  • External storage: 2TB SSD (recommended); having more storage space will allow you to store more projects and assets, as well as backups.
  • Graphics card: DirectX 11 or 12 compatible graphics card, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER (recommended); a powerful GPU will enable you to use the advanced rendering features of Unreal Engine 5 such as Nanite and Lumen, as well as improve the visual quality and performance of your projects.
  • External tools: Xoreax Incredibuild (Dev Tools Package) (recommended); this tool will speed up the compilation and building process of your projects by using distributed computing.

In addition to these requirements, you will also need some software to run and develop with Unreal Engine 5, such as:

  • DirectX Runtime: DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010); this is required for running the engine on Windows.
  • Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2019 v16.11.5 or later (recommended), Visual Studio 2022; this is required for developing with C++ on Windows.
  • Xcode: Xcode Version 13.4.1; this is required for developing with C++ on macOS.
  • clang: clang 13.0.1; this is required for developing with C++ on Linux.
  • iTunes: iTunes 12 or higher; this is required for iOS app development on Windows or macOS.
  • IDE: Visual Studio Code, Rider, CLion, QtCreator; these are optional IDEs that you can use for developing with C++ on any platform.

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