Epic Games releases Unreal Engine 5.4
In April 2022, Epic Games launched Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), which has steadily become the preferred choice for many developers and is increasingly adopted by various games. At last month’s State of Unreal GDC 2024 event, Epic Games showcased the latest advancements of Unreal Engine 5.4, unveiling several new features.
Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 5.4, significantly enhancing its core toolkit. This version boasts improvements across multiple domains, including rendering, world-building, procedural content generation (PCG), animation and modeling tools, virtual production, and simulation.
A major highlight of this update is the integration of Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) within the Unreal Engine. Positioned as an alternative to NVIDIA’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS, TSR’s cross-platform capability stands out as one of its advantages, requiring no third-party plugins for developers to utilize. While TSR technology was less frequently adopted in the past due to quality concerns, the developers at Epic Games have not abandoned this super-resolution technology and have made significant quality enhancements, as evidenced by the release of Unreal Engine 5.4.
Unreal Engine 5.4’s TSR includes several improvements, such as History Resurrection—a new feature integrated into high, epic, and cinematic anti-aliasing settings. This feature preserves TSR historical data that can be used for display data enhancement, improving TSR stability and predictability whenever details are lost for various reasons.
Moreover, Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces experimental support for Vulkan ray tracing, meaning Vulkan API now matches the capabilities of DX12 and also supports ray tracing on Linux. Epic Games has also highlighted a potential performance boost in hardware ray tracing (HWRT) due to the addition of primitive types, claiming that the path tracer in Unreal Engine 5.4 is 15% faster than in 5.3.
