Tides of Annihilation is built on Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games' current-generation engine, and leans on its flagship rendering systems to render the shattered supernatural London and the mystical otherworld of Avalon. The studio behind the game, Eclipse Glow Games, has framed Unreal Engine 5 as the technical foundation that lets a debut project from a newly formed studio aim for a high-fidelity current-gen visual target. Nanite handles the detail of the world, Lumen carries the lighting, and a stack of platform-specific upscalers and reconstruction techniques carries the output to consoles and PC.
Overview
Unreal Engine 5 is the fifth major generation of Epic Games' cross-platform engine, aimed squarely at PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and high-end PC hardware. Its headline features are Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and Lumen, a dynamic global illumination and reflection solution. Together they remove many of the classic authoring limits on polygon counts and baked lighting, which suits a game like Tides of Annihilation that wants to mix detailed modern urban geometry with shifting supernatural environments without cutting one side to make the other work.
Eclipse Glow Games has pitched the title as a single-player action-adventure with high-fidelity visuals powered by Unreal Engine 5, realistic lighting, and smooth character animation. That framing has been repeated across developer interviews, the State of Play reveal in February 2025, and subsequent trailers, including the gameplay show and the path tracing reveal. The engine is central to the studio's pitch, not an implementation detail.
Why Eclipse Glow Chose UE5
Eclipse Glow Games is a debut studio, and co-CEO Ary Chen has been open in interviews about the difficulty of balancing ambition with technical realities on a first project. Unreal Engine 5 is the common answer to that problem across the wider industry right now. Its feature set is already cutting-edge, its tooling is mature, and there is a large hiring pool of developers who have shipped on it. Choosing UE5 lets a small new team punch above its weight on visuals without building a bespoke engine to do it.
The game's core creative hook reinforces that choice. Tides of Annihilation depends on the visual contrast between a recognisable real-world London and a fractured Arthurian otherworld, with the two constantly bleeding into one another through the Mirror Space Folded Realm. Selling that contrast requires dense urban geometry, consistent dynamic lighting across both sides of the veil, and seamless transitions between them. UE5's feature set is tuned for exactly that kind of scene.
Key UE5 Features Used
Coverage of the game so far has pointed to a standard current-gen Unreal Engine 5 stack, built around three flagship systems.
Nanite is UE5's virtualized micropolygon geometry system. It streams only the triangles that actually contribute to each pixel, which allows artists to use film-quality assets with hundreds of millions of polygons in a real-time scene. In Tides of Annihilation, Nanite carries the dense, complex environments of ruined London, where modern architecture is intertwined with supernatural overgrowth, and the massive surfaces of the Colossal Knights that players climb as vertical levels.
Lumen is UE5's dynamic global illumination and reflection system. It bounces light off surfaces in real time without relying on baked lightmaps, so lighting keeps working when geometry shifts or lights move. This is especially visible in Mirror Space sequences, where architecture transforms around the player and the light has to follow. The interaction between natural and supernatural lighting, mixing London's overcast sky with Avalon's otherworldly glow, relies on Lumen to keep its consistency.
Virtual Shadow Maps are UE5's high-resolution shadow pipeline designed to pair with Nanite-scale geometry. They produce per-pixel shadows across large, detailed scenes without the usual filtering artefacts, which matters in an open cityscape full of collapsed architecture and towering enemies casting long shadows across the streets.
Graphics and Scale
The scale the game is pitching is part of why UE5 matters to it. Tides of Annihilation is described as a 30+ hour action-adventure with over thirty bosses, interconnected zones across London, and a parallel Avalon realm. The Colossal Knights in particular are treated as moving levels: players climb their bodies and fight across their surfaces, so individual enemies are authored at a scale that would have been difficult to hit in a previous engine generation without aggressive LOD tricks. Nanite's virtualized geometry is what makes carrying that kind of detail from hero closeups to full-body views practical inside a single streamed environment.
Trailer footage and exclusive screenshots released through Xbox Partner Preview, State of Play, and GDC 2026 materials have leaned on dense urban scenes: broken office blocks and transit infrastructure in London, mirrored skies and folded architecture in Avalon, and large-scale encounters that move freely between the two. The visual pitch is consistent with what Nanite plus Lumen plus Virtual Shadow Maps are designed to deliver.
Mirror Space Realm Rendering
The Mirror Space Folded Realm is the game's central visual gimmick: mortal London and mystical Avalon fold onto one another so a single playable space can exist in both forms at once. Reflections, duplicated geometry, and alternate versions of the same street appear around the player as they move, and combat arenas can flip between sides mid-fight as part of the Dual Frontline Battle System.
That mechanic leans hard on UE5's lighting pipeline. Baked light is a poor fit for a space that reshapes itself around the camera, so Lumen's fully dynamic global illumination is the natural match. Nanite holds the detailed geometry on both sides of the overlap at the same time, and Virtual Shadow Maps keep shadows consistent as the architecture rearranges. The result is a realm that the developers can twist without the lighting or shadows obviously breaking, which is a large part of why the effect reads as seamless in footage rather than like a cut to a different level.
Path Tracing and Ray Tracing
Tides of Annihilation is also being positioned as a graphics show for the PC side. A dedicated path tracing trailer accompanied the DLSS 4.5 reveal, confirming that the launch build on PC will offer a fully path-traced mode on top of the default Lumen-based lighting. Path tracing simulates light by tracing rays through the full scene rather than approximating bounces, and it is more expensive than traditional ray tracing but delivers physically accurate global illumination, reflections, caustics, and shadows.
The console side uses a lighter touch. On PlayStation 5 Pro, the game uses ray tracing for reflections and global illumination rather than full path tracing, paired with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution as the reconstruction layer. On the base PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, the game relies on Lumen's software path for global illumination without adding full ray tracing on top, which keeps those versions inside each console's budget while still using the same underlying lighting system.
Performance Targets
Publicly shared performance figures cluster around two buckets: a PC show number aimed at the high end, and console targets aimed at stability.
PC show: the DLSS 4.5 promotional demo was recorded on a GeForce RTX 5090 in 4K with maximum graphics settings, path tracing enabled, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation at the 4x setting. Reported benchmark figures describe roughly 80 frames per second in 4K at maximum settings without DLSS, and over 300 frames per second in 4K at maximum settings on the same hardware with DLSS 4 active.
PS5 Pro: higher output resolution than the base PS5, ray-traced reflections and global illumination, improved image fidelity, and a stable 60 frames per second target, with PSSR doing the reconstruction work.
Base PS5 and Xbox Series X|S: standard UE5 Lumen lighting without full ray tracing, tuned to hold a stable frame rate inside each console's power budget.
DLSS 4.5 and Multi Frame Generation
The PC build supports DLSS 4.5 with Multi Frame Generation, and the game has been used as one of the flagship titles featured for DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation alongside other current-gen show titles. Multi Frame Generation extends the earlier DLSS 3 frame generation approach by inserting several generated frames between each native frame, which is how the 4K numbers at the top of the PC performance range become achievable with path tracing turned on.
The point of showing the game under those conditions is not that most players will run it at those settings. It is that the underlying asset quality and lighting simulation hold up under the most demanding settings the engine can offer. The path-tracing mode is treated as an optional high-end target on PC, not a baseline requirement, and the rest of the Platforms and Release support covers the more realistic settings most players will actually use.
Cross-Platform Implementation
Tides of Annihilation is a multi-platform release covering PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 Pro, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, with Xbox Play Anywhere support planned so PC and Xbox Series owners share a single purchase and save. That cross-platform scope is a big part of why Unreal Engine 5 is the right pick for a debut studio: UE5's platform backends, streaming systems, and graphics features scale across every target Eclipse Glow has committed to.
Each platform has its own upscaler plugged into the engine: PSSR on PS5 Pro, DLSS 4.5 on RTX GeForce hardware, with the engine's standard Temporal Super Resolution and other established upscalers covering the rest of the PC market and the base console targets. Under all of them, Nanite, Lumen, and Virtual Shadow Maps run as the shared core, so a player on base PlayStation 5 is looking at the same underlying rendering pipeline as a player on an RTX 5090 with path tracing, just with a different set of quality dials turned up or down.