Unreal is way more versatile and easier to use than CryEngine, and a lot more capable for AAA game development than Unity. Looking at UE5, none of these alternatives have equivalents for features like Nanite or Lumen.
I’ve seen the presentation of Nanite and Lumen a month ago and they seem like very interesting technologies. I still haven’t seen a game implement Nanite to get a significant performance boost though. Lumen is more of a filmmakers tool, since lighting in games is often preferred to be more stylized than realistic. But this also brings up another issue with UE. The constant updates distract developers from actually fulfilling their vision and finishing the game. Early Access titles often stagnate development to update to a new engine version and implement new technologies, instead of providing content and bugfixes. And if you don’t update the to a new engine, the community whines about it. So the devs have no choice. The versitality has its price, it’s like UE tries to become jack of all trades, but master of none in an effort to provide everybody with a platform.
Lumen is not a filmmakers tool. Fortnite is already using it in production on current gen consoles, and Immortals of Aveum will be using it exclusively when it launches later this month.
Nanite is about eliminating LoD pop in without a performance penalty. I wouldn’t expect games to run faster, only look better.
