[6] To demonstrate the ease of use of the engine, both companies collaborated on a demo called "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" for the PlayStation 5 which featured a photorealistic cave setting that could be explored by players.

[17][18][19] A major feature of Unreal Engine 5 is Nanite, a virtualized geometry system that allows developers to use photogrammetry and other high-detail meshes in their games without significant performance impact.

Nanite automatically manages LoDs by scaling models dynamically based on draw distance, screen resolution, and performance requirements.

[24] According to a talk given by Epic Games' Brian Karis at SIGGRAPH 2021, one of the significant innovations in Nanite is its ability to stitch edges between different LoDs seamlessly, ensuring that no cracks appear at boundaries.

[23] Unreal Engine 5 takes advantage of the high-speed solid-state storage in next-generation hardware in order to steam assets into memory as they are needed.

The Nanite virtualized geometry technology allows Epic to take advantage of its past acquisition of Quixel, the world's largest photogrammetry library as of 2019.

[7] The MetaHuman Creator is a project based on technology from three companies acquired by Epic—3Lateral, Cubic Motion, and Quixel—to allow developers to quickly create realistic human characters that can then be exported for use within Unreal.

[33] Through partnership with Cesium, Epic plans to offer a free plugin to provide 3D geospatial data for Unreal users, allowing them to recreate any part of the mapped surface of Earth.

[36] From UE 5.5 onwards, Epic Games introduced a layer that makes it easier to maintain WebRTC internally, allowing Pixel Streaming 2 plugin to began shipping with Unreal Engine.

[52][53] CD Projekt, meanwhile, is working on a custom system that improves entity loading for The Witcher IV, parts of which may be upstreamed to Unreal Engine itself.

[59] Epic unveiled per-seat licensing of the Unreal Engine, starting in April 2024, for its runtime use with non-gaming applications such as in film and television production if their revenues exceed $1 million, with each seat costing $1850/year.