Unreal Engine 5 wins with 22.4 per cent. Epic's impressive graphics engine pipped favourites Blender, Adobe Creative Cloud and Affinity Designer (it was so close, see below) to win the reader's poll of software of the decade. While Unreal Engine launched in 1998, it was the releases of Unreal Engine 4 in 2014 that really saw it evolve from a generally PC and home console game engine and into something bigger that took in consoles, PC games, VR, Android and mobile devices and Epic even opened its own asset and resource marketplace and the Epic Game Store.
The new Unreal Engine 5 takes everything a step further; it's a powerful creator platform that is no longer the preserve of video games but a software platform capable of rendering film CG, creating animation, pre-vis, arch-viz, VR, metaverse worlds, TV VFX and so much more – it really has evolved into the perfect platform for all digital creativity.
It's super-powerful and delivers new levels of real time lighting and high resolution textures; it uses Quixel photogrammetry and is compatible with all existing 3D modelling formats, meaning assets created for film can now be imported and used in video games – billions of polygons can be on screen at 4K resolution, and it really is impressive.
Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5.
