Satisfactory update: Transitioning to Unreal Engine 5 brings noticeable visual improvements.

Yesterday Swedish developer Coffee Stain Studios released update #8 for their successful factory building game project, Satisfactory. With this update, the game has been ported to Unreal Engine 5 from the previous version of Unreal Engine 4, making Satisfactory the first third-party game to support UE5.

The transition to a new engine opened up the possibility for many technical improvements. In particular, the World Partitioning system was used to optimize the streaming output of levels and reduce delays when moving around the open world, the Chaos physical modeling system was introduced to control vehicles, and support for UE5's own Temporal Super Resolution scaling mechanism was added. Moreover, some of the game's content (specifically, rocks, rocks, and conveyor elements) has been redesigned to support the new Nanite virtual geometry system.

However, the most notable change affecting the visual experience is the replacement of the lighting system with Lumen from Unreal Engine 5. This feature is currently disabled by default due to increased performance overhead, but can be enabled by disabling Lumen reflections in the graphics settings.

Despite this, there will be a high quality lighting system, which, as YouTuber TotalXClipse's comparison video shows, looks just great.

These changes are just the beginning of the full potential of Lumen from Unreal Engine 5. Coffee Stain Studios has not yet announced support for ray tracing at the hardware level, which suggests that they use software for ray tracing based on distance fields between meshes.

only to expand. We hope that more UE4 games decide to move to UE5, as Satisfactory, Payday 3 and others did. The visual effect of this can be really impressive.