This week, Epic Games published an updated Unreal Engine 5.1 roadmap that’s packed with exciting improvements coming to the popular game creation software.
For starters, engineers are trying to fix those terrible stuttering issues that often plague Unreal Engine 4+ games. Unreal Engine 5.1 gets an automated PSO collection feature to fix this long-standing issue.
With the increasing focus in UE5 on DX12 and Vulkan, we are focusing our attention on solving the problem of runtime issues caused by the creation of pipeline state objects, which is inherent in these RHIs. The previous solution required a PSO pre-cache process, which could be cumbersome for large projects and still leave gaps in the cache leading to problems.
Automated PSO collection replaces the manual labor required to collect all possible combinations of PSOs for a project while keeping the number of PSOs as small as possible.
Of course, this patch will not be available for the many Unreal Engine 4 games still in development, but at least we can hope that future titles using Unreal Engine 5.1+ will no longer suffer from this problem.
This is just one of the many improvements Epic is planning for the new version of Unreal Engine 5. The engine’s most exciting new features, Lumen and Nanite, will both receive various improvements.
Lumen
- Improved performance optimizations in High scale mode with the goal of reaching 60 fps on consoles
- Better support for foliage
- Reflections on a single layer of water
- Support for high quality mirror reflections on translucent surfaces
- nDisplay support (SWRT and HWRT)
- Initial split-screen support (SWRT only); performance characteristics yet to be determined
- Experimental: Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) in Vulkan – Surface cache lighting only, no Hit Lighting support yet
- Lots of stability, quality and bug fixes
Nanite
Nanite’s main focus for Unreal Engine 5.1 is the addition of a programmable rasterization framework, opening the door to features such as masked materials, two-sided foliage, pixel depth offset, and color offset. world position. Please note that the exact feature list and expected stability and performance characteristics are still to be determined.
Other updates include:
- Nanite material switch in Material Editor
- Additional diagnostic and debugging modes
- Numerous quality and performance improvements
There’s more, including various Lightmass, Path Tracing, Niagara, and Chaos Cloth GPU improvements. Unreal Engine 5.1 doesn’t have a release date yet, nor do any of the games made with it (except Epic’s Fortnite), but in the meantime, you can watch this remake of the Unreal Engine 4 Elemental demo.
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