CARY, NC – Epic Games is releasing Unreal Engine 4.25, with next-gen platform support enabling developers to build and ship games for Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X using Unreal Engine.
This support solidifies Unreal Engine as a robust foundation for game developers with scalability across platforms, including mobile, consoles, and PC. In addition, Unreal Engine’s Niagara visual effects system, battle-tested on Fortnite, is now moving from Beta to production-ready in this release.
Key features in Unreal Engine 4.25 include:
Next-Gen Console Platform Support
Unreal Engine 4.25 delivers initial support for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X as first-class platforms, and throughout the year will be updating the 4.25-Plus branch with optimizations, fixes, and certification requirements to support developers launching on the next generation of consoles.
Enhanced Profiling
First introduced in UE 4.23, Unreal Insights offers UI improvements and introduces Networking Insights to help developers optimize, analyze, and debug network traffic while cross-referencing against other types of data.
Niagara VFX Now Production-Ready
Battle-tested on Fortnite, Unreal Engine’s Niagara visual effects system is now production-ready.
Chaos Advancements
Unreal Engine’s Chaos physics and destruction system, now in active use on shipping seasons of Fortnite, includes major advancements in UE 4.25.
Shading Model Improvements
The UE 4.25 release adds a new physically based Thin Transparency shading model and a new Anisotropy material input property, as well as improvements to the Clear Coat shading model.
Ray Tracing Features Now Production-Ready
Unreal Engine’s ray tracing features are production-ready in the 4.25 release, along with several additions and improvements.
High-Quality Media Output
UE 4.25 adds a new pipeline that supports high-quality rendering of movies and stills with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur, as well as tiled rendering for extremely high-resolution output. This lets creators efficiently produce high-quality media for use in cinematics, marketing materials, linear entertainment, and very high-resolution images intended for print, all directly from Unreal Engine without post-processing.
Immersive, Realistic Audio
In UE 4.25, the Unreal Audio Engine now provides support for convolution reverb processing and sound field rendering, ultimately delivering more immersive and lifelike audio to listeners.
LiDAR Point Cloud Support
UE 4.25 adds native Unreal Engine support for importing, visualizing, editing, and interacting with point clouds acquired from laser scanning devices, thereby giving accurate context to newly designed elements.
Improved HoloLens 2 Support
The UE 4.25 release offers production-ready support for Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, and introduces initial support for Azure Spatial Anchors.