Major New Features

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Next-gen console platform support (Beta)
We’ve added initial support for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X consoles as first-class platforms, and throughout the year we will be updating the 4.25-Plus branch with optimizations, fixes, and certification requirements. Platform-specific functionality includes next-gen audio features, together with initial support for Online Subsystems and for TRC and XR certification. 
Production-ready Niagara VFX
The Niagara visual effects system is now production-ready—and already production-proven on Fortnite—with a polished new UI and significant performance and stability improvements. New features include the ability to create complex, large-scale particle effects such as flocking and chains, and to have particles react to music or other audio sources—all in real time.
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.

Immersive, true-to-life audio (Beta)

The Unreal Audio Engine now supports convolution reverb processing and sound field rendering. These features enable designers to enhance their projects with more immersive and realistic audio experiences by using detailed captured or designed sound fields that spherically envelop their listeners, and sampled reverb impulses that simulate real-life acoustic spaces.

LiDAR point cloud support

Aggregate and use huge datasets captured from the real world to visualize locations or to give accurate context to newly designed elements, with new built-in support in Unreal Engine for importing, visualizing, editing, and interacting with multiple point cloud segments, including the ability to delete hidden points.

Enhanced HoloLens 2 support

Support for HoloLens 2 is now production-ready! This release also features performance improvements, new support for mixed reality capture from a third-person camera view, the new ability to enable HoloLens remoting from packaged Unreal Engine applications via a command line, and more. There’s also initial support for Azure Spatial Anchors (Beta).
Release Notes 4.25