Unreal Engine 5 is becoming an increasingly popular option for developing current-gen games. Epic recently released Unreal Engine software version 5.4.
From a gamer’s perspective, the most exciting thing about Unreal Engine 5.4 is Epic’s promise of improved performance. If there’s one area where UE5 falls short, it’s performance: many games developed on the engine run poorly on current-gen consoles. The goal of Unreal Engine 5.4 is to make 60fps gaming more achievable on modern hardware. Epic also seems to indicate that they’ve made improvements to shader compilation, hoping to eliminate that nasty stuttering that has plagued some UE games in recent years.
“With many developers targeting 60Hz performance, we’ve invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4. This includes refactoring systems to allow for greater parallelism, as well as adding GPU-assisted discarding to hardware ray tracing, which now also benefits from additional primitive types and an optimized path tracer. Further optimizations were made to shader compilation, resulting in a noticeable reduction in project preparation time.”
Of course, there are plenty of new features designed to improve visual fidelity as well: Nanite adds “Adaptive Tessellation,” which can create incredibly fine detail and land cover without consuming an excessive amount of processing power, and “Heterogeneous Volumes,” which can create highly realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds. Epic’s built-in Temporal Super Rsolution scaling has also been improved, giving developers more options to easily connect their AI and machine learning tools to UE5. Full information about all changes can be found here.
Tags: Epic releases Unreal Engine offering #60fps performance improvements shader compilation
