Epic Games has announced a new technological breakthrough in Unreal that will benefit the Switch 2.
They made this announcement in State of Unreal 2026:
Lumen, our dynamic global illumination system, now has a lightweight mode called Lumen Lite designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost.
That makes Lumen viable where it wasn’t before, including on switch 2. And that work is already helping drive further nanite optimization efforts for the platform.
They explained further that Lumen Lite is twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, and it can run on Switch 2 games at an impressive 60 FPS. Lumen Lite is part of Unreal Engine 5.8.
For those who were curious, some developers have already used global illumination on Nintendo Switch 2. Bloober Team used Lumen itself for Layers of Fear, while Nintendo apparently had their own solution for Kirby Air Riders based on patents.
But Nvidia’s SOC has brought Nintendo to a place where game companies no longer have to do challenging work to bring games to their platforms. Thanks to Nvidia’s own innovations, Nintendo has a chance at real parity with PlayStation and Xbox.
