Unreal Engine 4.21 Released, Linux Now Defaults To Vulkan

Unreal Engine 4.21 is out today as the last feature release for Epic Games' engine of 2018. This is an exciting game engine update for Linux and Vulkan fans.

Unreal Engine 4.21 features various tooling and creation improvements for game developers, optimizations that come to the engine following Epic's development of Fortnite for iOS and Android, performance enhancements, early access pixel streaming support, animation system optimizations, and more.

There are various Linux fixes to this build of Unreal Engine 4.21. Arguably most exciting though is that Unreal Engine 4.21 on Linux now defaults to Vulkan over OpenGL. OpenGL will still be used as a fallback on Linux systems plus there is also a new Linux media player with support for WebM VP8/VP9 videos, a Linux crash reporting GUI, and other enhancements.

Vulkan on Android is also in better shape thanks to their Fortnite work. Unreal Engine on Android with Vulkan is now up to 20% faster than OpenGL ES.

More details on these notable improvements to Unreal Engine 4.21 via UnrealEngine.com.