During their State of Unreal GDC 2024 keynote, Epic presented Unreal Engine 5.4, which is set to add several new features.
Partner Skydance Media showcased a couple of them following the reveal of the Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra trailer. To start with, there’ll be an Adaptive Tessellation feature available for Nanite. Its main goal is to reduce the memory requirements across huge levels while maintaining the incredible levels of detail that Nanite has been known for. Nanite Tessellation also supports Sparse Volume Textures with animation and real-time streaming for minimum memory footprint.
Another new Unreal Engine 5.4 feature is Heterogeneous Volumes, which can render volumetric assets with cinematic quality and self-shadowing, with volumes casting shadows onto hard surfaces and composited with other translucent effects such as fog and particles. Moreover, local fog volumes and Niagara lightweight emitters will offer additional rendering options.
Animation is making a leap with the new UE5 version, too, thanks to the availability of Motion Matching, which has now officially been declared production-ready by Epic. The makers of Unreal Engine said this is a simple and efficient way to animate characters that has been used in Fortnite since the launch of Chapter 5. Epic will also release a free sample learning project that includes over 500 AAA animations created from high-end motion capture data with the locomotion and traversal dataset used in the keynote demo. The Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework, first introduced with 5.2, was also improved.
However, arguably the most exciting part of Unreal Engine 5.4 is the performance upgrade across the board. Simon Tourangeau, Vice President of Engineering for UE at Epic, took the stage to say:
We’ve made a lot of performance improvements. We now have faster Lumen, Shadows, and ray tracing. We’ve added Variable Rate Shading (VRS) for Nanite. We massively improved instance culling and we significantly improved parallelism in the renderer.
Any claim of performance upgrade has to be backed by some data, so Tourangeau said that the City Sample originally shipped with version 5.0 is now much faster in Unreal Engine 5.4 when performing a console test. More specifically, render thread time has been halved, while GPU time was reduced by 25%.
This should translate into meaningful performance boosts for games. However, keep in mind that most games released with UE 5.1, 5.2, or even 5.3 might not deem it worthy to upgrade. Even some of the developers currently working on 5.2 or 5.3 may not upgrade ahead of their game’s upcoming launch to avoid problems. Still, it’s a promising outlook for the future of Unreal Engine games, which comprise the majority of triple and double AA games in the PC and console space.
