Open 3D Foundation releases O3DE 25.05
The current Open 3D Engine sizzle reel. The latest version of the open-source game engine, O3DE 25.05, has just been released.
The Open 3D Foundation has released Open 3D Engine 25.05 (O3DE 25.05), the latest version of the open-source game engine.
The update improves performance of the Atom renderer by “up to 40%”, adds support for vertex colors in materials, and improves workflow in the Track View cinematics editor.
An open-source ‘AAA-capable’ game engine based on AWS’s Lumberyard
First announced in 2021, O3DE is an open-source, cross-platform “AAA-capable” game engine” pitched as a successor to Lumberyard, AWS’s free engine.
It features a modular, SDK-like design, open-source build system and new networking stack, and includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer Atom.
The engine is the first release of the Linux-Foundation-backed Open 3D Foundation: a games counterpart to VFX technology body the Academy Software Foundation.
Although the latest sizzle reel (embedded above), is still heavy on AWS’s own projects, O3DE is starting to be used on commercial games, like Team Plutinite’s State of Matter.
O3DE 25.05: better performance in the Atom renderer
The main changes in O3DE 25.05 are to the engine’s Atom renderer, with rendering performance improved by “up to 40%” through support for subpasses under the Vulkan and Metal APIs.
The multi-GPU rendering architecture has been refactored, and is now described as “mature”.
In addition, the BasePBR, StandardPBR and EnhancedPBR materials now support vertex colors.
Updates to Track View and support for OpenXR and ROS 2
Outside of materials and rendering, Track View, O3DE’s cinematics editor, gets workflow and stability improvements, and is now described as “fully operational”.
For AR and VR work, installation of OpenXR libraries is now handled automatically, rather than developers needing to install the SDKs for individual hardware platforms manually.
There is also a new Gem implementing the simulation interfaces for ROS 2, the latest version of Robot Operating System, the set of open-source libraries for building real-world robots.
Licensing and system requirements
Open 3D Engine 25.05 is available as compiled binaries for Windows 10+ and Ubuntu 22.04 Linux. The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 licence.
Read a full list of new features in O3DE 25.05 in the online changelog
Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.