Epic Games releases Unreal Engine 4.25, bearing next-gen platform support to enable developers to build and ship games for the PS5 and Xbox Series X with the engine. The support solidifies Unreal Engine as a robust foundation for game developers with scalability across platforms, including mobile, consoles, and PC. Unreal Engine’s Niagara visual effects system, previously battle-tested on Fortnite, is moving from Beta to production-ready with the Unreal Engine 4.25 release.
Find the following key features in Unreal Engine 4.25:
- Next-Gen Console Platform Support
- Initial support for PS5 and Xbox Series X
- Updates for the 4.25-Plus branch throughout the year with optimizations, fixes, certification requirements
- Includes platform-specific functionality, such as new audio advancements, initial support for online subsystems, and early support for TRC and XR certification requirements
- Enhanced Profiling
- Unreal Insights is now a standalone profiling application integrated with Unreal Engine to collect, analyze and visualize engine trace data
- Now offers UI improvements and introduces Networking Insights to help developers optimize, analyze, and debug network traffic while cross-referencing against other types of data
- Unreal Editor has a new Animation Insights plugin for animators to visualize gameplay state and live animation while working in the editor
- Niagara VFX Now Production-Ready
- Polished new UI, significant performance and stability issues, and an array of new features including an audio waveform data interface, particle-to-particle communication, and spatial hashing
- Create complex, large-scale particle effects such as flocking and chains, and have them react to music or audio sources in real time
- Chaos Advancements
- Destruction, static mesh dynamics with collisions, cloth, hair, rigid-body skeletal control for items are now supported
- Shading Model Improvements
- Physically-based Thin Transparency shading model and Anisotropy material input property added
- Improvements to Clear Coat shading model
- Thin Transparency has native support to simulate tinted translucent materials
- Anisotropy support enables simulation of complex materials like brushed metal or “sanded” material
- Clear Coat shading m odel is now more physically accurate
- Ray Tracing Features Now Production-Ready
- Added support for Niagara Mesh Emitters on both CPU and GPU, new Anisotropy shading model
- Significant improvements to Clear Coat shading model when used in conjunction with ray tracing features
- Clear Coat BRDF material support added to Path Tracer
- High-Quality Media Output
- New pipeline with support for high-quality rendering of movies and stills with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur, as well as tiled rendering for extremely high-resolution output
- Immersive, Realistic Audio
- Support for convolution reverb processing and sound field rendering, ultimately delivering more immersive and lifelike audio to listeners
- LiDAR Point Cloud Support
- Native Unreal Engine support for importing, visualizing, editing, and interacting with point clouds acquired from laser scanning devices aadded
- Improved HoloLens 2 Support
- Production-ready support for Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, and introduces initial support for Azure Spatial Anchors
The full list of features can be found on the official website.