Following its recent announcement of a “new era” of Rocket League alongside the reveal of Unreal Engine 6, Epic Games has today released Unreal Engine 5.8.

As part of this, lumen dynamic global illumination now offers a “Lumen Lite” mode. As Epic explains, this comes with benefits for games running on Switch 2:

“Lumen dynamic global illumination now offers a Lumen Lite mode, which is designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost by using irradiance fields with probe occlusion. Twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, it means that games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps. It’s also supported on PC.”

It elaborates on this, explaining how the medium scalability level targets 60fps on Switch 2 and includes handheld mode.

Unreal Engine’s Vice President of Engineering Simon Tourangeau made the following comments about Lumen Lite at Epic’s State of Unreal event this week and how it’s now easier to scale to different platforms:

“Lumen, our dynamic global illumination system, now has a lightweight mode called Lumen Lite, designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost. That makes Lumen viable where it wasn’t before, including on Switch 2. And that work is already helping drive further nanite optimization efforts for the platform.”

Epic’s newer version of its Unreal game engine powers games such as the battle royale Fortnite. Epic says UE 5.8 is its last planned “major” Unreal Engine 5 update on its roadmap, and it will now ramp up work on Unreal Engine 6.