Epic Games announced that the upgrade for their popular game development platform Unreal Engine 5.4 is now available.
Unreal Engine 5.4 promises major 60FPS performance improvements and better gaming quality.
About Unreal Engine 5.4
Unreal Engine 5 is quickly becoming the preferred choice for current-generation programming, and the most recent version of Epic’s software is now available. We got a taste of Unreal Engine 5.4 during last month’s State of Unreal GDC 2024 conference, but the software is now available to developers.
The most exciting aspect of Unreal Engine 5.4 for players is Epic’s promise of better performance. If there’s one area where UE5 has fallen short, it’s performance, with many games built on the engine suffering on current-gen consoles and demanding budget-busting systems to operate on PC.
Unreal Engine 5.4 seeks to make the 60fps experience more feasible on modern hardware. Epic also appears to have improved shader compilation, which should alleviate the unpleasant stutters that have plagued numerous UE titles in recent years.
Animation Quality
Motion Matching, which was previously revealed as an experimental feature, is now production-ready. It has been battle-tested in Fortnite Battle Royale and is available on all platforms, including mobile and console, and supports all 100 characters as well as NPCs.
Motion Matching is a flexible next-generation framework for animation features. Instead of using advanced logic to choose and transition animation clips at runtime, it searches a relatively large database of captured animation, using the character’s current motion information as the key.
Nanite Rendering
Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, a virtualized micro polygon geometry system, has received updates, including an experimental new Tessellation capability that allows for fine elements like cracks and bumps to be added at render time without modifying the mesh.
“Adaptive Tessellation,” which can create incredible fine details and ground cover without using a lot of processing power, and “Heterogenous Volumes,” which can create very realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds. Epic’s in-engine Temporal Super Resolution upscaling has also been improved, and developers now have more choices for seamlessly integrating AI and machine learning tools into UE5.
Graphic Rendering performance
Epic Games stated that it made significant efforts to improve rendering performance in UE 5.4, including refactoring the systems to allow for more parallelization and adding GPU instance culling to hardware raytracing, which now benefits from additional primitive types and an optimized Path Tracer. Additional optimizations to shader compilation have been introduced, resulting in a significant improvement in project cook times.
FAQ’s
What are the key improvements in Unreal Engine 5.4?
Enhanced performance, achieving stable 60 FPS across various platforms.
Which platforms benefit from these performance enhancements?
PC, consoles, and mobile devices see noticeable improvements.
How does this update impact game development?
Developers experience smoother workflows and optimized rendering.
Any notable features added in Unreal Engine 5.4?
Improved animation tools, lighting enhancements, and stability.
Can I expect better visuals with Unreal Engine 5.4?
Yes, the update delivers enhanced graphics fidelity and rendering capabilities.
