UE 5.4 now available
Unreal Engine 5.4, announced several weeks ago, is now available to all game developers, bringing important changes and improvements. Once implemented, gamers should expect better image quality, fewer features, and higher performance.
One of the most important updates comes to Unreal Engine’s TSR (Temporal Super Resolution), which is an alternative to other competing technologies including NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. The TSR technology has one advantage over all of these technologies: it is cross-platform and built into Unreal Engine, with no requirement for developers to add any third-party plugins for it to work.
The biggest issue was its quality compared to other technologies, but the UE developers are clearly not abandoning this super-resolution tech, and progress is being made to improve quality. The release of Unreal Engine 5.4 with improved TSR proves that point.
Unreal Engine 5:
- May 2020 : Announcement
- May 2021: Early Access
- April 2022 : Formal Launch (5.0)
- November 2022 : Unreal Engine 5.1 release
- May 2023 : Unreal Engine 5.2 release
- September 2023 : Unreal Engine 5.3 release
- April 2024 : Unreal Engine 5.4 release
One such improvement is “ History Resurrection ,” a new feature that will be added to High, Epic, and Cinematic anti-aliasing. Once TSR discards details for various reasons, such as occlusion, shading changes, or the simple fact that something is now out of the screen, the reaccumulation could have caused artifacts. History Resurrection will keep the TSR historical data that can be used for showing the data gain unless a better match is found in more recent frames. This feature will improve TSR stability and ensure that the output can be predicted. Furthermore, this means less ghosting.
TSR Visualization, Source: Unreal Engine
Developers will have new visualization modes that will help in understanding how TSR works and how it can be fine-tuned to reach specific performance targets.
Unreal developers have also noticed that many developers are targeting 60 Hz in their game design. In UE 5.4, significant efforts have been made to enhance rendering performance . The systems have been restructured to allow for better multitasking, and GPU instance culling has been introduced to improve hardware ray tracing. This update also includes optimizations for shader compilation, resulting in faster project loading times.
Speaking of ray tracing, Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces experimental support for Vulkan Ray Tracing . This means that Vulkan API now has parity with DX12, and this also means support for ray tracing on Linux . Developers will be able to use Hit Lighting mode in Lumen and Path tracing.
The patch notes also mention that Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) is expected to see an increase in performance thanks to additional primitive types. The Unreal Engine 5.4 path tracer is claimed to be 15% faster than 5.3.
While those highlights are interesting, Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces a lot of other changes that are mostly relevant to game developers. Ultimately, the decision to implement UE 5.4 rests with them, and it’s their choice to take advantage of the new features. The game called Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is one of the games that takes advantage of Unreal Engine 5.4. It is shown in the UE teaser above.
Source: Unreal Engine