Quixel Dark Ruins feature
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Unreal Engine 5.5 MegaLights brings a massive performance boost

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Quixel has released an impressive new tech demo environment for Unreal Engine 5.5, called Dark Ruins. This demo features 372 unique meshes, 12 unique decals and 12 unique surfaces. It also supports Lumen and Nanite. And, from the looks of it, it’s also compatible with MegaLights.

Now what’s cool here is that YouTube’s ‘MxBenchmarkPC’ has compared the MegaLights version with the Software Lumen and the Hardware Lumen versions. And, as we can see, MegaLights can bring up to 50% better performance.

This right here shows why MegaLights is one of the most important new features of UE5.5. With MegaLights, an identical scene (with all the benefits of Hardware Lumen) can run way, way faster. And that’s without any image reduction.

The important thing to note is that MegaLights does not “de-activate” Hardware Lumen. So, this is a MAJOR optimization and performance improvement. And yes, this is a feature more and more games should start using.

What’s crazy here is that some people “tried” to optimize a scene from the previous MegaLights demo by removing Lumen, Nanite and most of the major features of UE5. By doing this, they introduced a lot of other issues (like pop-in issues that were not present with Nanite). Removing next-gen features is NOT what optimization should be. At least on PC. By that logic, the first Unreal was the worst optimized PC game ever released. Or how about Quake 3 Arena which did not have a Software Rendering Mode? How dare Carmack release such a thing? Unreal Tournament had a Software Mode and Q3 Arena didn’t feel like a generation ahead of it. What an un-optimized piece of sh*t. And hey. If you truly believe this is what optimization should be, then I guess you should stop playing PC games and play The Witcher 3 on Nintendo Switch.

Sadly, the rise of YouTube has given ignorant people the ability to rant about pretty much everything. A lot of people still don’t realize that Lumen is a form of Ray Tracing. And Ray Tracing IS expensive. But no. Suddenly, they want to run it – even in Software Mode – at Native 4K with 60FPS. You have to be STUPID to expect something like that, even on an RTX 4090.

But you know what? If you believe you can optimize UE5 better than Epic Games or the triple-A devs, develop and release a game. If you are truly capable of something like that, do it. And if it looks better than Hellblade 2 or Indiana Jones (with Path Tracing), a lot of people will buy it. You’ll make a lot of money. Then, you’ll have proven yourself. Until then, you sound like all those “fake” companies that promise “unlimited detail and graphics” in their games.

And hey, I’m not saying that devs have not misused UE5. For instance, modern games shouldn’t have traversal stutters. We all agree on this. All games should also have a shader compilation process when you first launch them. These are completely different things.

Here’s an example of how stupid people have become these days. STALKER 2 came out last month and did not have flashlight shadows or muzzle flash shadows. And, suddenly, people claimed that this was an issue with UE5. People started saying that UE5 prevented the devs from using visual features that were present in the previous games. But you know what? Silent Hill 2 Remake uses UE5 and has both flashlight shadows and muzzle flash shadows. Hell, you can easily add muzzle flash shadows in UE5 in the Editor. So, how can people believe that this was a UE5 limitation? It was clearly a dev decision (or oversight) and nothing more.

Anyway, you can go ahead and try the Dark Ruins Tech Demo yourselves. All you have to do is download it from this link.

If you own a high-end GPU, you should also try these other UE5 tech demos. The first one features a Witcher-like environment. The second shows off a Rome Italian Town. Both of them are incredible so make sure to give them ago.

Enjoy!

Unreal Engine 5.5 MegaLights Demo - Massive Up to 50% Performance Boost and Better Image Quality