Unreal Engine 5 continues to shape game design as more studios adopt Epic Games' engine (see our pick of the best software for game development). One of its selling points is Lumen, its global illumination (GI) system, but this can hold back performance.
A cinematic light artist has now shared an Unreal Engine 5.5.3 tech demo that uses only dynamic lighting: no Lumen, Pathtrace, RTX, DLSS or baked lighting. The aim was to use only Nanite with distance field meshes and Ambient Occlusion with screen space reflection to show what UE5 is capable of without some of its headline features.
Pasquale Scionti, who specialises in architectural visualization and videogames content in Unreal, took art influences from Blade Runner and Cyberpunk for the tech demo. He created the lighting and VFX rain with Ultra Dynamic Sky and used assets from Kitbash 3D and others.
As for how to achieve the lighting and proper shadowing with no baking, Pasquale said using local exposure and tonemap and Ambient Occlusion helped Everything was placed manually, he says. The result sees gameplay run at 120fps on RTX4090 at 4k Native Epic settings. .
You can download the demo via Google Drive. It seems to have maxed out the number of downloads for the moment, but let us know in the comments how it runs for you if you're able to download it.
If you need to upgrade your setup's performance, see our guides to the best graphics cards for gaming and the best laptops for game development.
