Unreal Engine 5.4 is out - ray tracing on Linux, better TSR scaling and better performance

The game engine Unreal Engine 5.4, announced a month ago, is now available to all game developers. One of the most important updates in the list is the improvement of TSR (Temporal Super Resolution) - an alternative to NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS.

The TSR technology has one advantage over all these technologies: it is cross-platform and built into Unreal Engine, developers do not need to add any third-party plugins for it to work. The biggest problem was the quality of TSR compared to competitors, but the UE5 developers clearly do not give up and put a lot of effort into improving it.

One of the improvements to TSR is the History Resurrection technology, a new feature for better smoothing during scaling. After TSR discards details for various reasons, such as occlusion, changes in shading, or objects leaving the frame, reaccumulating information could cause artifacts. History Resurrection will retain historical TSR data that can be used to display the growth of data if the best match is not found in the latest frames. This feature will improve TSR stability and ensure predictable results. Additionally, this means fewer halos. Developers will also have new visualization modes to understand how TSR works and how it can be customized to achieve specific performance targets.

The Unreal Engine authors also noted that many game developers are targeting a 60 Hz frame rate. Significant efforts have been made in UE 5.4 to improve rendering performance. Systems have been restructured to provide better multitasking, and instance culling with GPU has been introduced to enhance hardware ray tracing. This update also includes shader compilation optimization, contributing to faster project loading.

Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces experimental Vulkan Ray Tracing support. In fact, this means that the Vulkan API now matches DX12 and also supports ray tracing in Linux. Developers will be able to use Hit Lighting mode in Lumen and Path tracing.

The release notes also mention that hardware ray tracing (HWRT) should increase performance thanks to additional primitive types. It is claimed that Path tracing in Unreal Engine 5.4 is 15% faster than in 5.3. The game Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, featured in the teaser, will be one of the first to take advantage of Unreal Engine 5.4.

Source: VideoCardz