The Unreal Engine 5.4 will push some incredible visuals, but it will come at a huge performance cost, which may force most players to turn down some settings, even on the best GPUs on the market.
23.04.2024 - 23:13 / wccftech.com / Nathan Birch
Unreal Engine 5 is increasingly the go-to option for current-gen development, and now, the latest version of Epic’s software is here. We got a taste of Unreal Engine 5.4 during last month’s State of Unreal GDC 2024 showcase, but now the software is in developers’ hands.
From a player standpoint, the most exciting thing about Unreal Engine 5.4 are Epic’s promises of improved performance. If there’s one area UE5 has fallen short in, it’s performance, with many games built on the engine struggling on current-gen consoles and requiring wallet-destroying rigs to run well on PC. Unreal Engine 5.4 aims to make 60fps experiences more achievable on current hardware. Epic also seems to indicate they’ve made improvements to shader compilation, hopefully ironing out those frustrating stutters that have plagued some UE titles in recent years.
“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.”
Of course, there are plenty of new features designed to boost visual fidelity as well, with Nanite adding “Adaptive Tessellation” which can create incredible fine details and ground cover without consuming an excessive amount of processing power, and “Heterogenous Volumes,” which can produce very realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds. Epic’s in-engine Temporal Super Resolution upscaling has also been improved, and developers have been given more options to easily plug their AI and machine learning tools into UE5. You can get a full rundown of all the changes here.
For those who missed it, the Amy-Hennig-produced 1943: Rise of Hydra is getting early access to the latest UE5 tools, and recently showcased what 5.4 is capable of…
What’s your experience with Unreal Engine 5 games been so far? Will the engine start living up to its potential more with the release of 5.4?
The Unreal Engine 5.4 will push some incredible visuals, but it will come at a huge performance cost, which may force most players to turn down some settings, even on the best GPUs on the market.
Other than its brief cinematic announcement trailer earlier this year, we’ve seen very little of Terminator: Survivor, but though it remains to be seen how long we’ll have to wait before Nacon showcases gameplay for the open world survival title, the developer has offered new details on the game via an FAQ published on Steam.
NVIDIA has announced an update to the NvRTX branch of Epic's Unreal Engine 5. The major new feature is the addition of experimental support for ReSTIR Global Illumination, the ray tracing algorithm first discussed by NVIDIA researchers in the seminal paper Spatiotemporal Reservoir Resampling for Real-Time Ray Tracing with Dynamic Direct Lighting released at ACM SIGGRAPH 2020.
Bethesda has been promising the next update for Starfield would be a big one, and it turns out they weren’t exaggerating! The latest Starfield update lands in mid-May, although it’s available in beta right now and brings a lot of requested improvements. You can check out a video running down all the improvements below, or scroll on for our rundown.
Keeping track of all the latest video games coming out is an increasingly complex task, what with multiple PC storefronts, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, mobile, and more to keep track of, but don’t worry, I’m here to help. Every month I'll be running down the games you need to be keeping an eye on, from the big triple-A headliners, to the intriguing indies you might overlook.
NVIDIA DLSS 3 has been added to the open world spaceship shooter game Everspace 2 with the major free Incursions update that dropped yesterday, adding new events, legendary gear and catalysts, new treasure boxes called reliquaries, and improved controller support. Developer ROCKFISH has also upgraded the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.3, offering Lumen Global Illumination as an option for high-end PC users looking to improve the visuals.
Excitement has been slowly building for Manor Lords, a unique Middle-Ages-set combination of city building and real-time-strategy, for some time now, and now it seems it’s the latest big indie success. Manor Lords launched into early access today, and peaked at just a hair shy of 160,000 concurrent players on Steam, good for a top 5 place on the charts, even displacing the suddenly-hot Fallout 4 at times. It’s also the top-seller on Steam right now. And these stats don’t capture the whole picture, as Manor Lords isn’t a Steam exclusive – it’s also available via Game Pass on PC and Xbox Series X/S. For those who haven’t been keeping up, here’s a look at Manor Lords in action.
As promised by Capcom earlier in the month, Dragon's Dogma 2 has a new update on PS5. Patch 1.10, which weighs in at a very manageable 563MB, features adjustments to various aspects of the game, like making dragonsplague easier to spot, and improving pawn behaviour.
The next-gen version of Fallout 4, which makes the game playable natively on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, is now available to download. For download links, please refer to the below:
The PS5 and Xbox Series X|S upgrade for Fallout 4 is here, with updates rolling out for Xbox and PC players and a new PS5 version of the game available as a free upgrade for owners on Sony’s console – sadly not for PS Plus subscribers.
In recent years, it’s become common for AAA games to hold back their New Game+ modes, often rolling them out as part of a “big update” weeks or months after launch. Well, apparently, that won’t be the case with the upcoming PS5 exclusive Stellar Blade, which will have New Game+ available from launch, and it sounds pretty meaty. In addition to tackling the game at a higher difficulty, players can look forward to learning new skills and earning a bunch of NG+ exclusive outfits for Eve (a hefty 34 all!) We have more details about NG+ below, but first, check out Stellar Blade’s stylish launch trailer.
Prior to release, all indications were that Stellar Blade would be an unusually technically polished current-gen launch, with the game’s demo leaving many impressed. But, of course, demos aren’t always indicative of the final game, with devs sometimes taking a thin slice of gameplay and give it more polish than the rest of the game. Well, the review embargo for Stellar Blade has arrived, and it seems it’s not only a good time in terms of action (check out Wccftech’s positive review here) but according to the tech heads at Digital Foundry, the full game is every bit as technically sound as the demo. You can check out Digital Foundry’s full video analysis below, provided you have around 20 minutes to spare, or you can scroll down for our rundown of the salient points.