At its State of Unreal event in Chicago, Epic Games officially unveiled Unreal Engine 5.8, and one of its key new features is Lumen Lite: a scalability setting that targets the use of ray-traced global illumination for the Nintendo Switch 2, with the goal of 60 fps. As the feature also works for PCs, I thought I'd dive in and check out just what the fuss is all about. Or if indeed any fuss ought to be made.
By default, the Unreal Engine editor gives developers a simplified way of checking out various graphics settings to see how they affect performance and visual quality. There are 11 separate options that can be tweaked, but the new Lumen Lite mode only affects global illumination (GI) and reflections, as these are the main things that Epic's ray tracing system affects.
