Epic Games today announced the upcoming release of Unreal Engine 5.2. This latest version of the third-party engine, preferred by most of the renowned triple-A game developers, brings numerous new features and improvements. In particular, Epic Games has targeted a problem that has recently affected many PC games developed mainly with Unreal Engine 4 – stuttering.
The previous version, UE 5.1, introduced an experimental PSO precaching system to improve hitching in DirectX12 games. In UE 5.2, performance and stability have been further optimized. The system now allows object drawing to be skipped as long as the corresponding PSOs are not ready. The goal is to have the PSOs ready in time, but there is no guarantee. Thanks to the new skip support, stuttering should no longer occur if the PSO is not yet compiled. Epic has also reduced the number of caches to be compiled in Unreal Engine 5.2. Improved logic now intelligently identifies those caches that are never actually used. In this area, the old manual caching system can be used along with the automatic pre-caching system. However, it is unfortunate that it may take some time for game developers to upgrade to the new version to benefit from these improvements.
The Nanite virtual geometry system has been enhanced and now features several improvements. Features have been added to support custom depths and templates, lighting channels, and global clip planes. In addition, variable precision standards are available that can create high-quality reflections on vehicles, for example. The Nanite streamer, which retrieves geometry data from disk, has also been optimized to improve its performance, stability and statistical properties. Lumen, another significant feature of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), benefits from improved global illumination and occlusion effects for thin geometries such as ears on characters. In addition, seamless integration of hair is possible. The quality of reflections on translucent surfaces has been improved in Unreal Engine 5.2 with support for material roughness, which was previously only available for reflections. Software ray tracing now uses Asynchronous Compute on consoles by default. Hardware ray tracing now supports two-sided leafing and improves the approximation of secondary hops for reflections.
Epic has additionally added Async Compute support for inline ray tracing passes. In the new version, ray tracing shadows are more accurate for rect lights and lights with a source size.The rendering of uneven surfaces, especially human skin, has been optimized. In addition, Unreal Engine 5.2 extends Variable Rate Shading (VRS) from XR devices to the desktop and integrates Contrast Adaptive Shading (CAS). As a result, it analyzes the previous frame and improves the understanding of which areas should be rendered with reduced shading rates.
Game developers are also very likely to benefit from significant new features. One such example is the Procedural Content Generation Framework, which provides an extremely useful way to quickly populate large areas or even entire worlds with content. This is achieved by defining rules and parameters based on which content is automatically generated. There is also the brand new tool called Substrate, which replaces the traditional set of shading models with a modular framework. This supports a much wider range of interface appearances and makes it possible to achieve a more coordinated visual style.
Source: Epic
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