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.