Unreal Engine 4.25 has been officially released

Epic has officially released Unreal Engine 4.25, which is set to deliver support for both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X along with several other brand new features.

Support for the next-gen consoles is currently only in beta, and Epic says that 4.25-Plus branch of Unreal Engine will be updated throughout the year with optimisations, fixes, and certification requirements.

The update also means that the Niagara visual effects system is now out of beta and production-ready, with a polished new UI and significant performance and stability features.

Having already been proven on Fortnite, Niagara VFX now has the ability to create complex, large-scale particle effects such as flocking and chains, along with particles reacting to audio sources in real time.

You can find some of the other major updates included in Unreal Engine 4.25 listed below:

• Chaos physics and destruction system updates (Beta)
  • The Chaos physics system is now in active use on shipping seasons of Fortnite. With this release, Chaos supports destruction, static mesh dynamics with collisions, cloth, hair, rigid-body skeletal control for items such as ponytails, and scene queries.
• Enhanced profiling (Beta)
  • Unreal Insights now offers an improved user experience and introduces Networking Insights (Experimental), which helps developers optimize, analyze, and debug network traffic; we’ve also added a separate Animation Insights plugin (Experimental) to the Unreal Editor, enabling the visualization of gameplay state and live animation behavior.
• High-quality media output (Beta)
  • Now you can efficiently render high-quality movies and stills with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur—ideal for cinematics, marketing materials, and linear entertainment. In addition, the new pipeline supports tiled rendering, enabling extremely high-resolution images to be output directly from Unreal Engine without post-processing. 
• Shading model improvements
  • Easily simulate materials such as tinted car windows and brushed metal with a new physically based Thin Transparency shading model and a new Anisotropy material input property (Beta). In addition, the Clear Coat shading model, which can be used to simulate multilayered car paint, now exhibits a much more physically accurate response to directional, spot, and point lights.

For the complete list of new features included in Unreal Engine 4.25, follow the link here. Just be aware that the page may take a while to load.