I have installed the Unreal 5 preview yesterday, just when it was released.

The download is about 12 GB and was quick. I first tried a terrain to see if it was working on something simple and it did work!

So I cleaned up W.O.K May version and tried to load it inside Unreal. It is working! However the conclusions of this test are mixed.

The good:

• Unreal 5 editor is great, more readable, and non intrusive. I can imagine working every day with it. I think it is superior at 4.26 about the color and the fields visibility.
• It loads almost everything apart from plugins, with a good compatibility, weather, sky, water, all was working. So great job for the compatibility (compared to Unity who is the worse about it).

The bad:

• Unreal 5 Editor is SLOW. Everything is SLOW, to the point that it cannot be used without having a $2000 RTX video card.
• There is no improvement visually into the scene.
• Nanite is a dumb concept, compared with LOD. The demo scene is 100 GB! Just for a detailed landscape. Do they plan to make games 1 TB large? Also Nanite is not smart. It is just pushing a billions poly like a dumb ass asking to the video card to do all the work. No improvement is made for the scenes with a lot of actors for example, worse it is slow! Did they switched to C#? I had the feeling of using Unity.
• It crashes all the time. Change the details, crash, merge some static mesh, crash. At this point Unreal 5 is impossible to use on a large project.

Conclusion: did unreal fired the smart people to replace them with corporate robots? Gaming has always be defined by outsmarting the hardware with crazy tricks, and that’s why Starglider was possible on Atari and Amiga for example.

But here it seems that they have lost their smart brains, the ones who found deferred lighting, or screen space reflections, or PBR lighting. Please bring back the skilled team and optimize this monster.

I will stay on Unreal 4 until they fix all these problems, which may never happen.