With increased competition from the likes of the (mostly) free-to-use Unity, Epic's Unreal Engine isn't as ubiquitous as it once was. But the particle-heavy, real-time lighting-infused version 4 has powered its fair share of games since launch in 2014, from indie darlings like Abzû through to triple-A titles like Gears of War 4.

If you're a hardware company, getting baked-in support for your platform in Unreal's developer tools remains important, which is why the latest UE update is good news for Nintendo. UE 4.15 includes support for the upcoming Nintendo Switch, making it easier for developers to port games to the system. The Switch's unloved predecessor, the Wii U, was never officially supported by UE4. While developers could create ports for Wii U without Epic's tools, the time and investment required to do so didn't jibe with the system's lacklustre sales.

Support for the Switch in UE4 is currently described by Epic as "experimental," but the company plans for it to be in a "shippable state" come the next update. Given the Switch is based on hardware from graphics card gurus Nvidia—hardware that is already supported in UE4 for devices like Nvidia's Shield—full support is expected to arrive quickly. Indeed, one of the first UE4 games to launch on Switch will be Snake Pass, a quirky puzzle-platformer from Sumo Digital due for release in "early 2017."

Earlier this year, Nintendo's creative director, Shigeru Miyamoto, claimed the company's software developers had "mastered" UE4 but did not go as far as to say a UE4-powered game was in development. He did, however, acknowledge that the lack of external development tools for Wii U contributed to poor third-party support.

"Regarding our software development environment," Miyamoto said of the Switch, "third-party developers who are making software for PC can now easily adapt that software to work on our platform. In the current development environment, I'd say that it would take less than a year for them to port a PC game to Nintendo Switch... even though game software developers in the US and EU are often said to have superior skills to their Japanese counterparts when it comes to software development techniques, Nintendoʼs software developers have mastered state-of-the-art technologies such as Unreal Engine."

For those who game on PC, UE 4.15 introduces experimental support for HDR (high dynamic range) output, a new texture streaming system, and support for alternate frame rendering (AFR) in Nvidia SLI configurations.

Despite the impressive jump in image quality, even beyond that of the denser pixels pushed by 4K TVs, HDR content is notably sparse at present. Support in UE4 should lead to more content, although there are some caveats. The engine can only output HDR using Nvidia cards under the Direct3D 11 API or on devices that support Apple's Metal graphics API. Rendering paths for 1000-nit and 2000-nit displays are also supported.

That Epic is showing some love for SLI users should come as some comfort to those who have made the investment, particularly as Nvidia has been trying to distance itself from the technology. Alternate frame rendering differs from split frame rendering (SFR). Instead of each GPU rendering half a frame each, they render an entire frame each. This, in theory, is an efficient way to use both GPUs, but AFR can suffer from microstutter when poorly implemented.

Meanwhile, the new texture streaming system promises to "reduce CPU usage, memory usage, and load times while eliminating low resolution artifacts." Epic says that developers can expect a 40 percent reduction in texture memory usage, which should benefit those rocking video cards with less than 4GB of memory. For a full list of improvements in UE 4.15, check out Epic's blog post.