Is your game looking dated? Megalights in Unreal Engine 5.5 lets you add thousands of dynamic lights to a single scene

Lighting is crucial in both real-world and game environments. Over the past few years, companies have been pushing for ray tracing, and today Epic Games unveiled their new development called Megalights.

Megalights is a technology that allows developers to use significantly more lights in a single scene than ever before. All the lights are dynamic, realistic, with realistic shadows and the ability to illuminate volumetric fog.

In the video shown by the company, you can see a scene where a character moves through a location with over 1000 lights! Amazingly, the demonstration worked on the PlayStation 5, even not on the Pro version, meaning the technology is completely non-demanding.

Megalights is part of Unreal Engine 5.5 - a major update to the popular engine.

When the first games using Megalights will be released is unclear, but if we don't talk about potential updates to existing projects, it's likely to be at least a year.