The engine was first demonstrated at the WWDC 2007 by John D. Carmack on an eight-core computer; however, the demo used only a single core with single-threaded OpenGL implementation running on a 512 MB 7000 class Quadro video card.

The engine comes with a content-creation tools package called id Studio, which is supposed to be much more user-friendly and polished than in earlier versions.

Steve Nix from id Software stated that "Not only do we think people can make games outside the action-shooter space with our technology, we encourage it.

The first public demonstration focusing exclusively on the engine took place at QuakeCon in the same year[5] during the annual keynote held by John Carmack.

This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release.

Arkane removed unneeded elements from the engine like the mini open world and overhauled the graphics.

[10] During the development of The Evil Within, Tango Gameworks has also made heavy changes to the id Tech 5 engine for their own game.