Unreal Engine 5 has officially launched, lots of Linux and Vulkan improvements

After being available in Early Access since May 2021 and Preview since February 2022, Epic Games has today released Unreal Engine 5 which will no doubt go on to power some of the biggest upcoming releases.

"With this release, we aim to empower both large and small teams to really push the boundaries of what’s possible, visually and interactively. UE5 will enable you to realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before." — Epic Games.

Epic say that developers will be able to continue using "workflows supported in UE 4.27" but get access to the redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, improved path tracing and the list goes on.

You can see the whole launch event livestream in the below YouTube video:

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Two new starter samples have also been made for developers with:

Lyra Starter Game

Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project built alongside Unreal Engine 5 development to serve as an excellent starting point for creating new games, as well as a hands-on learning resource. We plan to continue to upgrade this living project with future releases to demonstrate our latest best practices.

City Sample

The City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene from The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience was built. The project—which consists of a complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters—demonstrates how we used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5 to create the experience.

You will also find plenty of Linux and Vulkan improvements for Unreal Engine 5 including: Nanite and Lumen (with software ray tracing only) on Linux, the Unreal Build Tool was also upgraded to support Clang's sanitizers for Linux (and Android), Vulkan and Linux support was also added to their "GameplayMediaEncoder", compliant 64-bit image atomics in Vulkan that fixes all validation issues with 64-bit atomics and allows the use of RADV driver (AMD + Linux) for Nanite and Lumen, multiple crashes were solved for Linux and loads more like:

• Increased Unix Cycles64 resolution to 100ns
• Fixed Unix crash messages printing a truncated memory address.
• Added support for asynchronous logging on forked instances
• SkeletalMeshComponents will now run multithreadable tasks on the taskgraph on forked multithreaded servers
• Moved FForkProcessHelper code in Fork.cpp.
• Added FForkProcessHelper::IsForkRequested function. This returns true when the process is set to fork child processes or simulate forking by itself.
• Implemented FUnixPlatformMisc::GetCPUVendor and GetCPUBrand() for non x64 Linux platforms to read and parse the /proc/cpuinfo file. Added tables for 64-bit arm cpu implementers and part numbers. This table may have further updates in the future.
• FUnixPlatformProcess::CreateProc no longer requires you to pass an absolute path to an executable. If passed an argument containing a program name but no path separators, it now searches directories specified in the $PATH environment variable in the same manner as the shell would. The underlying API has changed from posix_spawn to posix_spawnp, and failures are no longer treated as fatal.
• Add Linux -crashhandlerstacksize command line option to set crash handler stack size.
• Moved stack to mapped memory instead of allocating in the heap. This can set and reduce the size of the 200k stack significantly through the command line.
• Add DumpGPU viewer script for Linux and Mac. To use this, run the DumpGPU command in the console. This will open a folder to the DumpGPU HTML files and data, plus OpenGPUDumpViewer.sh. If you open OpenGPUDumpViewer.sh, the GPU Viewer will open in your web browser.
• Updated Linux SDL to 2.0.20.

Epic has confirmed that over 85 game studios are going to be using Unreal Engine 5 with more coming including The Coalition, CD PROJEKT RED, and Crystal Dynamics, who just revealed that they are building a new Tomb Raider game with UE5.

See more on the official site. Also see the announcement.