Rendering

The UE 5.7 renderer is a hybrid deferred + ray-traced pipeline with three tentpole technologies:

• Nanite — virtualized micropolygon geometry. Renders multi-million-triangle meshes without LODs.
• Lumen — software / hardware ray-traced global illumination and reflections.
• Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) — single 16K-resolution virtualized shadow per light.

On top of those, the pipeline supports:

System	Page
Streaming Virtual Textures + Runtime Virtual Textures	→
Render Targets	→
Path Tracer (reference renderer for cinematics)	→
Real-time DXR / Vulkan RT	→
Pixel Streaming (WebRTC video out)	→
Post Process pipeline	→

Render order at a glance

graph TB
  Z0[Visibility / culling] --> Z1[GBuffer pass]
  Z1 --> Z2[Nanite visualization buffer]
  Z2 --> Z3[Lighting pass<br/>Lumen GI + Reflections]
  Z3 --> Z4[Translucency]
  Z4 --> Z5[Post Process chain]
  Z5 --> Z6[Tonemap]
  Z6 --> Z7[Upscaling<br/>TSR / DLSS / FSR / XeSS]
  Z7 --> Z8[UI composition]

CVar quick reference

CVar	Effect
r.Lumen.HardwareRayTracing 1	Switch Lumen to hardware RT
r.Nanite.MaxPixelsPerEdge 1	Maximum Nanite quality
r.ScreenPercentage 100	Internal resolution percent
r.AntiAliasingMethod 2	0=off 1=FXAA 2=TAA 3=MSAA 4=TSR
r.RayTracing.GlobalIllumination.Brute Force	Reference RTGI for comparison
r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable 1	Virtual Shadow Maps
r.PathTracing 1	Path tracer mode

Hardware paths

Tier	Path	Targets
Low	Forward Shading + baked lighting	Mobile, Switch
Mid	Deferred + Lumen software	Last-gen consoles, integrated GPUs
High	Deferred + Lumen HWRT + Nanite	PC RTX 2070+, PS5, Xbox Series X
Top	Path Traced offline	Cinematics, Movie Render Queue