This update enables Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections by default. It includes some optimized settings to ensure these new lighting modes run as efficiently as possible. These new features are what make everything "pop" in Unreal Engine 5, but (as we always do) we wanted to focus on performance fixes prior to experimenting with these new rendering features.

As you can see, these new GI and reflection modes significantly increase the graphical fidelity of the game. There are now actual light bounces that adjust the color of surfaces to create a much more sophisticated representation of a scene. It also creates high quality reflections that can now show elements that are completely off-screen.

However while these new lighting modes look fantastic, we want to ensure performance is never compromised. Therefore we've included some new graphics settings that allow players to manually enable/disable these new features if they aren't desired. The following commands can be used to control Lumen settings:

• graphics_lumen
• graphics_lumen_gi
• graphics_lumen_reflections

These settings will save with your other video settings for the local device and are not synchronized via Steam Cloud as is the case with bindings, gameplay settings, ect.

In the workshop editor, a post process system can also forcibly disable Lumen on workshop maps if modders don't want these lighting features available on their maps at all. Finally we've included an engine system that detects if Lumen is disabled and automatically forces skylights to be stationary, otherwise they would have significant shadow artifacts without Lumen enabled.