A new Unreal Engine 5.4 comparison video was shared online today, highlighting the differences in reflections quality over the previous version of the engine.
The comparison video put together by JSFILMZ does a great job highlighting how the deprecated standalone ray tracing features, including ray-traced reflections, may impact quality. Using the same sequence with the same setting in a hardware accelerated scenario, JSFILMZ demonstrated how using the new Screen Traces option, which seems to use screen space reflections, results in worse reflections quality than in Unreal Engine 5.3 using ray-traced reflections.
Unreal Engine 5.4 was officially released yesterday, introducing several improvements, such as the new Nanite Adaptive Tessellation option, Heterogenous Volumes, which can produce realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds, improved Temporal Super Resolution upscaling, easier implementation of AI and machine learning tools and more. The new version of the engine also brings improved performance and shader compilation.
“With many developers targeting 60 Hz experiences, we’ve invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4. This includes refactoring the systems to enable a greater degree of parallelization, as well as adding GPU instance culling to hardware ray tracing, which also now benefits from additional primitive types and an optimized Path Tracer. Further optimizations have been made to shader compilation, resulting in a notable improvement in project cook times.
More information on the Unreal Engine 5.4 can be found on its official website.
