# Rendering Features for Mobile Games (5.4) + Unreal Fest 2025 mobile talk

source: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/rendering-features-for-mobile-games-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.4 ; slides: "Developing Mobile Games with UE 5.6", Jack Porter (Epic Games), Unreal Fest 2025 (PDF hosted at unrealsummit16.cafe24.com)
version: UE 5.4 Documentation (curl) + Epic staff talk slides (UE 5.6/5.7)
fetched: 2026-10-11

## Excerpts

- 5.4 doc feature tables compare three columns: Mobile Forward (OpenGL ES 3.2, Metal, Vulkan, Switch); Mobile Deferred (Metal, Vulkan, Switch); Mobile Forward w/ HDR Disabled (Head-mounted Mobile XR).
- Static: Light Functions No / Yes / No. IES Texture (stationary/movable rows): No / Yes / No. Decal Response (DBuffer) Roughness: No / Yes / No. Deferred Decal Yes / Yes / No. Light Shafts Yes / Yes / No.
- Common to all three: Sky Atmosphere Yes; Volumetric Clouds No; Volumetric Fog No; Virtual Shadow Maps No; TSR No; 1 directional light.
- Slides (5.6): "Deferred Renderer now default used on all mobile platforms" (Android GLES, Android Vulkan, iOS Metal); "128 bits/pixel Gbuffer"; "More lighting models and static lighting now supported"; "Memoryless on iOS and Vulkan Android – Stored on-chip in GPU tile memory"; "Now Multipass on OpenGL ES – More reliable and actually faster than PLS and framebuffer fetch"; Lighting model (BRDF) changed to match desktop renderer.
- Slides future plans (5.7+): Multipass Deferred – store mobile Gbuffer to system memory for all mobile platforms. Benefits: depth laid down by base pass, no depth prepass; DFAO, DF shadows, SSR, dbuffer decals as scalability options; access to gbuffer for post-processing; performance equal or slightly faster than subpass mode. Costs: extra system RAM (~15MB in our case); increased memory bandwidth, mitigated by framebuffer compression.