Unreal Engine is written in C++ and features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobiles, console, and virtual reality platforms.

Unreal Engine 4 brought support for physically based materials and the "Blueprints" visual scripting system.

Unreal Engine 5 features Nanite, a virtualized geometry system that allows game developers to use arbitrarily high quality meshes with automatically generated Level of Detail, and Lumen, a dynamic global illumination and reflections system that uses software and hardware ray tracing.

[5] Deus Ex lead programmer Chris Norden described it as "super flexible" but noted its low execution speed.

[8][9] One of the key moments in Unreal Engine 4's development was, we had a series of debates about UnrealScript – the scripting language I'd built that we'd carried through three generations.

And there was this massive meeting to try and sort it out, and try to cut things and decide what to keep, and plan and...there was this point where I looked at that and said 'you know, everything you're proposing to add to UnrealScript is already in C++.

[11] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.

[12] Conceived by Sweeney,[13] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.

The Marketplace is a digital storefront that allows content creators and developers to provide art assets, models, sounds, environments, code snippets, and other features that others could purchase, along with tutorials and other guides.

The engine is used in a number of high-profile game titles with high graphics capabilities, including Hogwarts Legacy,[18] PUBG: Battlegrounds, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant and Yoshi's Crafted World, in addition to games developed by Epic, including Gears of War and Fortnite.

[22][23][24][25] Unreal Engine has found use in film making to create virtual sets that can track with a camera's motion around actors and objects and be rendered in real time to large LED screens and atmospheric lighting systems.

The show had already looked at the use of virtual sets before and had some technology established, but integrated the use of Unreal Engine as with StageCraft for its third season.

[35] As part of an extension of its MegaGrants, Epic also funded 45 additional projects since around 2020 for making movies and short films in the Unreal Engine.

[40] Several projects originated with this support agreement, including an anaesthesiology training software for U.S. Army physicians, a multiplayer crime scene simulation developed by the FBI Academy, and various applications for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity with the aim to help intelligence analysts recognize and mitigate cognitive biases that might affect their work.