Epic Games has released a new video highlighting the key features of the latest version of Unreal Engine 5, UE5.4. Unreal Engine 5.4 is currently available to all developers. And the following video will give you a glimpse of its main features.
Unreal Engine 5.4 has great new tools for creating and animating characters right inside the editor. A cool feature is the Modular Control Rig, which allows you to build animation setups using easy-to-understand parts instead of complex graphs. Another handy addition is Automatic Retargeting. This tool will make it faster and simpler to use bipedal character animations and achieve amazing results. The Sequencer also got a big upgrade with better organization and easier controls. In addition, the animation system for games has also been improved.
Unreal Engine 5.4 also brings major improvements to its rendering. Epic Games has reorganized things to make them run faster by doing multiple tasks at once. Now UE5.4 also has GPU instance clipping to help with hardware Ray Tracing. And they've made shader compilation even better.
Nanite got a new Tessellation feature that Skydance New Media recently showed off. Marvel 1943 will use this feature to its fullest. In addition, Temporal Super Resolution has become more stable and faster. Most probably still prefer DLSS and XeSS over TSR. And ... well ... we can't really blame them.
Epic Games has also showcased some other features that are more suitable for films and movies. As such, we will not go into detail about them. However, those interested can still catch a glimpse of them in the video.
For what it's worth, only the game Marvel 1943 will benefit from this latest version of Unreal Engine 5. At least, it's the only one from the UE5 games announced so far. So don't expect other upcoming UE5 games to use it. In fact, I'm not sure if we'll even get a game that uses UE5.3.
Epic Games released the first version of Unreal Engine 5 on May 26, 2021 and formally launched it to developers on April 5, 2022. So for two years, Epic Games has been working hard to improve it.
Regardless, those interested can find the release notes for Unreal Engine 5.4 here . So go ahead and take a look at them.