Epic Games today announced the public release of Unreal Engine 5.2, the next version of the popular engine that “Chosen by most AAAA game developers“. The company announces an updated anti-freeze system, new Lumen lighting features and Nanite geometry, as well as many other useful innovations.
Image Source: Epic
In the previous release of UE 5.1, an experimental PSO (Threading State Object) pre-cache system was introduced in order to reduce the number of freezes in DirectX12 games. In UE 5.2, its performance and stability have been improved, and the system now supports skipping the rendering of objects if the corresponding PSOs are not yet ready. Epic has also reduced the number of compilation caches in Unreal Engine 5.2 thanks to improved logic – the system now skips the cache that will not be used. At the same time, it became possible to combine the old manual caching system with automation.
The Nanite geometry virtualization system has also received some improvements. There is now support for custom depth and stencils, lighting channels, and a global clipping plane. Variable-precision normals are now available to create, for example, high-quality reflections on cars, and Nanite Streamer, which extracts geometric data from disk, has received performance and stability improvements.
Lumen, another major feature of UE5, has improved global illumination and occlusions for subtle geometry (such as ears) on characters. High-quality translucency reflections received support for material roughness (they were limited to mirroring only) in Unreal Engine 5.2, and software ray tracing now uses asynchronous compute for consoles by default. In addition, hardware ray tracing now supports two-sided foliage and can better approximate secondary bounces for reflections.
Epic has also added support for asynchronous calculations for built-in raytraced passes, and raytraced shadows for Rect Lights and source-sized lights are more accurate in the new version of the engine. Improved surface rendering for skin types of humanoid characters. In addition, Unreal Engine 5.2 extends variable rate shading (VRS) from augmented reality devices to the desktop and adds Contrast Adaptive Shading (CAS) to analyze the previous frame and better understand which areas should be rendered at a reduced shading rate.
Realizing a layered surface with Substrate technology
Game developers are also likely to appreciate other big innovations, such as the Procedural Content Generation Framework, which will be useful for quickly populating large areas or even worlds after rules and parameters have been defined. As well as the experimental technology Substrate – a completely new tool that replaced the standard set of shading models with new ones. The new feature supports a wider range of appearance surfaces and allows you to create a modular structure to provide the most attractive and layered look.
The full list of changes in the new version of the Epic Games proprietary engine can be found at pages official site of Unreal Engine.
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