Unreal Engine 5 Engine Changes

What parts of Unreal Engine 4 have been removed or deprecated in Unreal Engine 5.

Updated about 2 years ago Edit Page Revisions

Audio

  • Removed
    • Legacy audio backend (5.0) - made obsolete by Audio Mixer
    • Vivox Voice Chat (5.0) - voice chat currently supported by Audio Mixer
    • Dynamotor Synth plugin (5.0)
    • Sound Visualization plugin (5.0) - it worked only in the editor, replaced with Audio Synesthesia
    • TimeSynth plugin (5.0) - replaced by Quartz
  • Deprecated
    • Old audio system (5.x) - made obsolete by MetaSounds

Core

  • Removed
    • 32-bit platforms (5.x) - most supported platfroms are currently 64-bit
    • Event-Driven Loader (5.0) - replaced by Zen Loader

Networking

  • Removed
    • Legacy Socket Systems (5.0) - made obsolete by ASIO (SocketSubsystemBDS, SocketBuilders, etc.)
    • Unused Packet Encryption (5.0) - only DTLS is used currently

Non-linear animation

  • Removed
    • Matinee (5.x) - deprecated for a long time, replaced with Sequencer. It's possible to convert assets
    • Sequence Recoder (5.0) - replaced by Take Recorder
    • Movie Scene Capture (5.0) - replaced by Movie Render Queue
    • Motion Trail plugin (5.0) - it was a experimental plugin
  • Deprecated
    • Lens Distortion plugin (5.0)
    • Timecode Synchronizer plugin (5.0)

Platforms

  • Removed Google VR support (5.0)
  • Removed Magic Leap (Lumin) support (5.0)

Physics

  • PhysX depreacated in 5.0, replaced by Chaos
  • PhysX gonna be removed entirely in 5.1

Programming

  • Removed support for Visual Studio 2015/2017 (5.0)
  • Added support for Visual Studio 2022

Rendering

  • Removed
    • Legacy Tonemapper (5.0 EA)
    • Distance Field GI (5.0 EA) - replaced by Lumen
    • Light Propagation Volumes (5.0) - made obsolete by Lumen
    • Hardware Tesselation (5.0) - made obsolete by Nanite. It's recommended to try Virtual Heighfield Mesh in order to replace tessalation while working on landscape.
    • Niagara Extras plugin (5.0 EA)
  • Deprecated
    • Cascade (5.x) - replaced by Niagara, it's possible to convert assets
    • Atmospheric Fog - replaced by physically-correct Sky Atmosphere

World building

  • BSP (5.x) - deprecated in 5.0 EA for editing, volumes still use them. Mesh Editor Tools replace BSP for mesh editing
  • World Composition deprecated (5.0 EA), althought its code is untouched. Meant to be replaced by World Partition

Further read