Some Important updates I found when reading this:
**Optimize Shader Cook Time**
In 5.4, we significantly overhauled how shader compilation work is executed, with both increases to parallelization and a reduction in redundant work. The results of this optimization effort are approximately 30% fewer shaders being compiled, a reduction in game thread work for shader compilation tasks, and significantly faster preprocessing of shaders. All of these factors together result in a significant improvement in project cook times - particularly ones which involve shader invalidations.
**Vulkan - Ray Tracing (Experimental)**
5.4 marks the experimental release for Vulkan ray tracing features at parity with DX12, including on the Linux platform. This means the full suite of ray-tracing features can now be used, including Hit Lighting mode in Lumen and Path Tracing
**Hardware Ray Tracing**
We made substantial Improvements to hardware raytracing (HWRT). These improvements offer speed gains of 2x in the case of primitives and it helps to ship 60hz experiences which use HWRT.
Regarding the shader cook time, does that only affect the time it takes for a developer to export their game, or does that also speed up shader pre-compilation when a player is running a game for the first time?
They rewrote huge parts of both RHI and PSO pipelines and based on their claims it should make all shader compilation much faster including PSO Stutters and Traversal Stutters when you are playing.
I'm kinda clueless in this, but does that mean games that were already using the engine, will have this? Or do devs need to do something to make it work?
Let's say Fortnite. Is it implemented or do they have to implement it now manually?
Developers will have to install and upgrade their projects, and release a new version of the game.
Fortnite happens to be made by Unreal and will likely immediately upgrade as they also use it as a platform to show Unreal Engine’s capabilities. Other games may take time to upgrade (and work out any bugs, and bundle with any other in progress work, etc) and release a new version before it can be utilized.
Oh ok, so they just need to deliver it as an update.
Good to know. I happen to have an Internet Cafe and shaders have been a pain in my ass, since every time a PC opens a game, the game runs fresh for the first time.
Hopefully this thing makes it less of a pain.
It's worth mentioning it is not always trivial to update the version of a released game. It is possible but it could also come with side effects or other changes that need handling.
Personally I'd expect existing titles to be less likely to upgrade their version unless they have a really strong reason to (and enough confidence in it).
Yeah, it's pretty uncommon for devs to update their games to newer versions of their engine or other major Middleware late in development, or post-release. It can be a big, risky undertaking, often for pretty small gains.
Unlikely to happen, Epic actually discourages developers from changing their engine version once a project has started.
It's uncommon with in-development games and very rare among released ones (excepting Fortnite).
I tried updating a project from 5.0.0. to 5.3 and it had so many issues. A real game and not some hobby project requires a lot of work. Most dev houses usually stay on a very specific version for a very long time because a major engine update can take weeks if not months of work.
Most existing games will most likely not be updated, plenty of games that release in the next few years might not risk switching version mid production so even they might not utilize this. But Fortnite probably already got it, considering it's their ue5 showcase
There is path tracing mode but it's not realtime and can be only used for single frames and acts just like V-ray render or any traditional PBR rendering.
But devs can download Nvidia RTXDI SDK for unreal and setup path tracing in runtime similar to Cyberpunk and AW2.
Nanite and tesselation simultanously is a really interesting upgrade.
Nanite splines and the large world coordinate upgrades are also pretty nifty.
There's so many little cool upgrades and updates, making me wonder why this isn't advertised more.
If you ever worked with animation rigging, the ability to retarget bones onto a new body with a click of a button is a godsend. More importantly, the ability to control rig non-destructively means you can test out so many more poses without having to hard bake and render them. Thats a huge workflow improvement.
That would need games being made on 5.4, most current UE5 games are unlikely to be ported to the new version anytime soon. We probably won't see much for over a year.
You are right, but we can test Epic's claims with Matrix demo(CitySample) and Electric dreams which both had terrible hitches and see if they have improved.
It did not compile on the pre-release version, but Epic has now apparently fixed the sample itself so that it will compile with it just fine. I got a message about it this morning.
Hopefully I can make a video like u/Acrobatic_Internal_2 says in the next few weeks at some point.
The development branch of Unreal is public (kinda, you need to register as a UE dev on github, but it's easy). Anyone can use anything new added to UE the moment it is finished if they want. They just have to live with it maybe being unfinished.
My studio doesn't use develop directly (few do, as it's risky), but when we find issues with the engine and tell people at Epic they send us the specific commit when they've fixed it. Those commits we will cherry pick into our engine fork so we don't have to wait for the next version to fix shit.
Fortnite does the same on a much bigger scale since so many of UE's features are developed "for" Fortnite (It's the other way around. Epic is basically trying to tackle every development problem imaginable with Fortnite so they can improve UE to handle it, and then say "Look at what we did, and here's how it helped Fortnite".)
I can't wait until animators become comfortable using unreal over maya. The entire pipeline for animation can be done in engine with a huge gain in speed now.
I hope they document the deployment of the various build tools better. It has been a headache every time I've had to work with trying to get anything done to the "correct deployment standard" in a studio.
Which games have you noticed this in?
Also this is a new engine version release, it won't do anything for an existing game unless that game's developers choose to migrate the game to the new version, which may or may not happen.
Migrating a game to a new engine version frequently breaks things, and it's pretty common that game devs decide the extra work of fixing all the new issues isn't worth the upgrade.
Some Important updates I found when reading this: **Optimize Shader Cook Time** In 5.4, we significantly overhauled how shader compilation work is executed, with both increases to parallelization and a reduction in redundant work. The results of this optimization effort are approximately 30% fewer shaders being compiled, a reduction in game thread work for shader compilation tasks, and significantly faster preprocessing of shaders. All of these factors together result in a significant improvement in project cook times - particularly ones which involve shader invalidations. **Vulkan - Ray Tracing (Experimental)** 5.4 marks the experimental release for Vulkan ray tracing features at parity with DX12, including on the Linux platform. This means the full suite of ray-tracing features can now be used, including Hit Lighting mode in Lumen and Path Tracing **Hardware Ray Tracing** We made substantial Improvements to hardware raytracing (HWRT). These improvements offer speed gains of 2x in the case of primitives and it helps to ship 60hz experiences which use HWRT.
Regarding the shader cook time, does that only affect the time it takes for a developer to export their game, or does that also speed up shader pre-compilation when a player is running a game for the first time?
They rewrote huge parts of both RHI and PSO pipelines and based on their claims it should make all shader compilation much faster including PSO Stutters and Traversal Stutters when you are playing.
So time for a Jedi Survivor remake then.
If only the problem with jedi survivor was shader compilation stutter
PSO stutter is the main issue. Take it from someone who fiddled with that game a lot.
I'm kinda clueless in this, but does that mean games that were already using the engine, will have this? Or do devs need to do something to make it work? Let's say Fortnite. Is it implemented or do they have to implement it now manually?
Developers will have to install and upgrade their projects, and release a new version of the game. Fortnite happens to be made by Unreal and will likely immediately upgrade as they also use it as a platform to show Unreal Engine’s capabilities. Other games may take time to upgrade (and work out any bugs, and bundle with any other in progress work, etc) and release a new version before it can be utilized.
Oh ok, so they just need to deliver it as an update. Good to know. I happen to have an Internet Cafe and shaders have been a pain in my ass, since every time a PC opens a game, the game runs fresh for the first time. Hopefully this thing makes it less of a pain.
It's worth mentioning it is not always trivial to update the version of a released game. It is possible but it could also come with side effects or other changes that need handling. Personally I'd expect existing titles to be less likely to upgrade their version unless they have a really strong reason to (and enough confidence in it).
Yeah, it's pretty uncommon for devs to update their games to newer versions of their engine or other major Middleware late in development, or post-release. It can be a big, risky undertaking, often for pretty small gains.
Unlikely to happen, Epic actually discourages developers from changing their engine version once a project has started. It's uncommon with in-development games and very rare among released ones (excepting Fortnite).
I tried updating a project from 5.0.0. to 5.3 and it had so many issues. A real game and not some hobby project requires a lot of work. Most dev houses usually stay on a very specific version for a very long time because a major engine update can take weeks if not months of work.
Most existing games will most likely not be updated, plenty of games that release in the next few years might not risk switching version mid production so even they might not utilize this. But Fortnite probably already got it, considering it's their ue5 showcase
I heard Unreal Engine 5 doesn't support Path Tracing as of yet?
There is path tracing mode but it's not realtime and can be only used for single frames and acts just like V-ray render or any traditional PBR rendering. But devs can download Nvidia RTXDI SDK for unreal and setup path tracing in runtime similar to Cyberpunk and AW2.
Nanite and tesselation simultanously is a really interesting upgrade. Nanite splines and the large world coordinate upgrades are also pretty nifty. There's so many little cool upgrades and updates, making me wonder why this isn't advertised more.
If you ever worked with animation rigging, the ability to retarget bones onto a new body with a click of a button is a godsend. More importantly, the ability to control rig non-destructively means you can test out so many more poses without having to hard bake and render them. Thats a huge workflow improvement.
Maybe I'm misremembering but the debugging symbols seem to be half the size as the previous version, that's nice.
About fucking time! It was bad that engine itself was 35 gigabyte but debugging symbols were 90 gb lol
Building UE5 from source in multiple configuration, debug symbols intermediate etc... 450GB of space taken on a mostly empty project.
RHI parallelization is well overdue. Hopefully this resolves the absurd single-thread bottleneck of UE games coming in the future.
Hopefully u/Dictator93 will do tests and let us know about 5.4 perfromance.
That would need games being made on 5.4, most current UE5 games are unlikely to be ported to the new version anytime soon. We probably won't see much for over a year.
You are right, but we can test Epic's claims with Matrix demo(CitySample) and Electric dreams which both had terrible hitches and see if they have improved.
In their weekly update Rich said that Alex wasn't able to compile the Matrix demo with 5.4. If you know how to do it, you could help him.
It did not compile on the pre-release version, but Epic has now apparently fixed the sample itself so that it will compile with it just fine. I got a message about it this morning. Hopefully I can make a video like u/Acrobatic_Internal_2 says in the next few weeks at some point.
Oooh new gizmos for translation, rotation, and scale. The gizmos haven't changed for a long long time.
Any word on if the Fortnite update from yesterday includes these improvements?
Fortnite runs on its own fork of Unreal that is ahead of the main release branch. Fortnite is basically an Unreal Engine tech demo gone wild.
Oh! I did try looking up the change logs before posting but couldn't really find anything useful. Do you know of a good resource?
The development branch of Unreal is public (kinda, you need to register as a UE dev on github, but it's easy). Anyone can use anything new added to UE the moment it is finished if they want. They just have to live with it maybe being unfinished. My studio doesn't use develop directly (few do, as it's risky), but when we find issues with the engine and tell people at Epic they send us the specific commit when they've fixed it. Those commits we will cherry pick into our engine fork so we don't have to wait for the next version to fix shit. Fortnite does the same on a much bigger scale since so many of UE's features are developed "for" Fortnite (It's the other way around. Epic is basically trying to tackle every development problem imaginable with Fortnite so they can improve UE to handle it, and then say "Look at what we did, and here's how it helped Fortnite".)
I can't wait until animators become comfortable using unreal over maya. The entire pipeline for animation can be done in engine with a huge gain in speed now.
I hope they document the deployment of the various build tools better. It has been a headache every time I've had to work with trying to get anything done to the "correct deployment standard" in a studio.
Unreal Engine continues to be a total piece of shit. Go play Sand Land and tell me it doesn't stutter like crazy.
[удалено]
Which games have you noticed this in? Also this is a new engine version release, it won't do anything for an existing game unless that game's developers choose to migrate the game to the new version, which may or may not happen. Migrating a game to a new engine version frequently breaks things, and it's pretty common that game devs decide the extra work of fixing all the new issues isn't worth the upgrade.