Over five years ago, Epic Games dropped the Lumen in the Land of Nanite tech demo running on PlayStation 5 to unveil the power of Unreal Engine 5. The demo showcased the breakthrough features of Nanite's virtualized micropolygon geometry for extreme detail and Lumen for fully dynamic global illumination.
Since then, Unreal Engine 5 has unsurprisingly claimed a place in our pick of the best game development software. It's also now the biggest engine in terms of game sales (although Unity remains the most-used engine overall). But that May 2020 demo has resurfaced, and some people are wondering, why do games in 2026 still not look like that?
