We’re pleased to announce that Unreal Engine 4.25 is now available for download, with a host of new and enhanced features for industries across the board.
For game developers, this is the first release with initial support for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X as first-class platforms, and throughout the year we will be updating the 4.25-Plus branch with optimizations, fixes, and certification requirements to support developers launching on the next generation of consoles. Features include platform-specific functionality, such as new audio advancements, initial support for online subsystems, and early support for TRC and XR certification requirements.

No matter how powerful your target platform, you’ll want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of it, which is where profiling comes in. The Unreal Insights standalone profiling application now offers an improved user experience and introduces Networking Insights, which helps you optimize, analyze, and debug network traffic; we’ve also added a separate Animation Insights plugin to the Unreal Editor, enabling the visualization of gameplay state and live animation behavior.

The Fortnite team has been battle-testing Niagara VFX and Chaos physics, and these feature sets are now in use in currently shipping seasons of the game. Niagara is now production-ready, with a polished new UI and signficant performance and stability improvements. There are also a host of new features, including the ability to create complex, large-scale particle effects such as flocking and chains, and to have particles react to music or other audio sources—all in real time.

Meanwhile, we’re continuing to progress the Chaos physics and destruction system, and we’re happy to say that with this release, Chaos supports destruction, static mesh dynamics with collisions, cloth, hair, rigid-body skeletal control for items such as ponytails, and scene queries. There’s still more to come in future releases.

If you’re looking to produce high-quality movies and stills for uses like cinematics, marketing materials, or linear entertainment, look no further than our brand-new media output pipeline that lets you render with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur. The pipeline also supports tiled rendering, so you can produce extremely high-resolution images directly from Unreal Engine without post-processing. Multiple render jobs can be queued and rendered without user intervention.

For simulating materials like tinted car windows and brushed metal, there’s a new Thin Transparency shading model, and a new Anisotropy material input property.