There’s no denying the visual brilliance of ray tracing effects, but performance has always been a major barrier to using them. That’s why the new Unreal Engine 5 update is causing major excitement, as it brings up to 2x improvements in certain aspects of ray tracing functionality.
Unreal Engine 5.4, an updated version of Epic Games’ engine, should make ray tracing more accessible to those who don’t have top-end graphics cards, thanks to numerous changes to the code. While performance improvements will naturally vary depending on the graphics card, AMD and Intel cards will benefit the most, while Nvidia will likely solidify its position as the leader.
As described in the “Hardware Ray Tracing” section of the huge changelog released by Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5.4 offers “2x the speed” of hardware ray tracing (HWRT). This makes it easier for developers to create games with a target frame rate of 60 fps on consoles and, naturally, improves performance on PC as well.
Epic Games achieved this by adding new primitive types that basically refer to anything in the engine that contains geometry, as well as speeding up the Unreal Engine path tracer by 15%. What’s even better is that these benefits seem to be as easy as can be for developers to implement into new or existing games.
We’ll find out how much all this will actually manifest itself when big-budget games on UE5 using the latest version start coming out.
You can read all the notes about the UE 5.4 version here.
