Unreal Engine 5.4 Out Now, Offering Improvements to 60fps Performance, Shader Compilation

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?