[UE4]Release Version Features Notes

Keywords: UE4, Release Version Features Notes

4.21

Pause Clothing Simulation
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Animation/Sequences/Notifies

4.22

• Run-time Instancing
• Movable Spotlight support on Mobile
• Dithered LOD Transitions on Mobile

4.23

• Unreal Insights(Beta)
• Chaos - Destruction (Beta)
• Skin Weight Profile system
• Virtual Texturing (which can reduce texture memory overhead and increase performance when using very large textures)

4.24

• Animation Updates:

  • Inertial Blending (Beta)
  • Animation Blueprint Linking (Beta)

• Editor Updates:

  • Atmospheric Sky

• Geometry Updates:

  • Modeling Mode (Experimental)
  • Modeling Mode Sculpting Tools (Experimental)

• Mobile Updates:

  • Auto-instancing on Mobile (Experimental)

• Networking Updates:

  • DTLS Support (Experimental).

• Open World Updates:

  • Landscape Blueprint Brushes and Landmass Plugin (Beta).

Origin:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-and-releases/1683413-unreal-engine-4-24-preview

5.1

Mobile rendering has undergone some internal changes following improvements made to the rest of the Unreal Engine renderer.

• New performance improvements and features include mobile GPUScene instancing and culling, Skin Cache, Distance Field support, CSM caching, and the pre-integrated SSS shading model.
• Mobile Deferred Rendering Mode is a deferred renderer optimized for modern mobile GPU architecture that supports improved lighting and reflection quality and features over that of default Forward Mobile Renderer.(OpenGL ES Experimental)

Notes:

• OpenGL ES version 3.2 is now required on Android
• iOS version 14 or later is supported

Mobile rendering improvements
https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/c/453-mobile-rendering-improvements

5.2

Async Compute:

• SWRT mode uses Async Compute on console by default.
• Support async compute for inline ray-tracing passes.
• Added the r.SceneDepthHZBAsyncCompute console variable to run HZB generation on async compute. This prevents GPU under-utilization in scenes where a very large number of individual occlusion queries are issued. The r.SceneDepthHZBAsyncCompute console variable has the following possible values:
  • 0: Don’t use async compute (default)
  • 1: Use async compute, start as soon as possible
  • 2: Use async compute, start after ComputeLightGrid.CompactLinks pass

Origin:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-5.2-release-notes?application_version=5.2

5.3

Async Compute:

• RHI: enabled async compute by default in D3D12 on NVIDIA Ampere and newer cards.
• Lumen: significant Lumen HWRT optimizations, including enabling async compute for HWRT by default on consoles.

Origin:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-5.3-release-notes?application_version=5.3

5.6

Renderer Parallelization
Render Thread performance is very often the limiting factor for UE titles. This is because previously some operations were restricted to this particular thread, even though current platforms and graphics API provide methods for them to be done in parallel. We improved performance by refactoring the Renderer Hardware Interface (RHI) API to remove these constraints and fully utilize the multithreading capabilities of the target hardware.

RHI – Bindless Resources
Bindless resources are a low-level feature related to the management of textures and other types of data buffers in modern Renderer Hardware Interfaces (RHIs) such as DX12, Vulkan, and Metal. We added support for bindless resources to provide the means for more flexible GPU programming paradigms and additional features within the renderer, and as a requirement for full ray tracing support on Vulkan.

While not a direct user-facing feature, support for bindless might be of interest to some users writing C++ plugins and custom engine modifications relevant to rendering.

Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing Optimizations
In Unreal Engine 5.6, Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode delivers even greater performance on current-generation hardware. These low-level optimizations ensure faster, more efficient rendering, bringing high-end visual fidelity and scalability that now matches the frame budget of the software ray tracing mode. This frees up valuable CPU resources on your target platform and overall helps achieve a more consistent 60hz frame rate.

Virtual Shadow Maps Optimizations
Virtual Shadow Maps in Unreal Engine 5.6 further improves on shadow performance and memory usage with optimized scene culling while increasing fidelity and artistic control.

GPU Profiler 2.0
Unreal Engine 5.6 introduces a re-architected Insights GPU profiler.
The goal is to unify existing profiling systems within the engine (Stats, ProfileGPU, Insights) to use the same data stream increasing its reported accuracy and consistency when profiling a scene.
We overhauled the way timestamps are collected for the GPU timeline and have all the RHI’s produce this information in a common format. The new event stream and Insights API improvements surface more information in the new GPU profiling tools:

• async queue, multi GPU, pipeline bubbles (GPU idle/busy states), cross-queue dependencies (fence waits)

Origin:
https://www.tomlooman.com/unreal-engine-5-6-performance-highlights/

不降志，不屈身，不追赶时髦，也不回避危险。──胡适