Epic Games has announced that Unreal Engine 5.2 is now available for download to everyone. Moreover, the team has detailed its new features that developers can use in their games.
For starters, UE 5.2 supports Procedural Content Generation (PCG) tools and the Substrate shading system.
According to Epic, the new Substrate shading system gives artists the freedom to compose and layer different shading models to achieve levels of fidelity and quality not possible before in real-time. In addition, the new PCG tools empower artists to define rules and parameters to quickly populate expansive, highly detailed spaces that are art-directable in manner and work seamlessly with hand-placed content.
Additional updates in Unreal Engine 5.2 include enhancements to the virtual production toolset, including a new iPad app which will offer an intuitive touch-based interface for stage operations; native support for Apple Silicon within the Unreal Editor; and a new ML Deformer sample project which explores how Unreal Engine machine learning technology can be used to create a high-fidelity real-time character with deformations driven by full muscle, flesh, and cloth simulation.
Furthermore, Unreal Engine 5.2 brings some Nanite and Lumen improvements. And yes, this new version has the new PSO precaching mechanism to improve PSO hitching in DX12 titles. This is huge, so let’s hope that developers will take advantage of it.
Do note that the upcoming Unreal Engine 5 games won’t likely support this feature. After all, these DX12 PSO improvements were first introduced in UE5.1. So no, I don’t expect Layers of Fear, Immortals of Aveum, or Atlas Fallen to be using them.
Lastly, you can find the full release notes for UE5.2 here!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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3 most relevant improvements:
1. PSO is now done by the engine asynchronously by default, a la DXVK Async/GPLAsync
2. TSR has been further improved from UE 5.1, or what you can see in Fortnite today
3. Setting AA to EPIC, for some dumb reason, it being defaulted to 200% render scale.
I’ve never heard anyone ever refer to a version as 5 dot 2, it’s always been point.
As someone who worked in the tech industry. Either is fine.
I think stutter eng… sorry I meant Unreal Engine should put more resources & effort into improving their performance rather than visuals.
The engine is a mockery for the gaming community now because of its terrible performance… completely overshadowing it’s fantastic photorealism visuals they want to achieve so bad.
It’s called “forward rendering”, and Unreal Engine 4 and 5 already support it, but development studios and publishers are convinced that games have to use a deferred renderer for more light sources in a scene. Since that’s what the big game studios all seem to want, it seems like all new game devs are trained to believe its the right way to make games.
Using the forward renderer doesn’t remove shader stutter.
I was talking about FPS, not stuttering. Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 have solutions in place to prevent shader compilation stuttering.
That being said, Unreal Engine games don’t constantly stutter due to shader compilation. Both DirectX and NVIDIA drivers have shader caches, and they don’t need to constantly recompile shaders once they’ve been compiled once and cached (granted that cache is invalidated when you install a new graphics driver so it will still happen ocassionally).
If you are having problems with frequent stuttering in an Unreal Engine game, then try increasing the size of your shader cache in the NVIDIA Control Panel under “Manage 3D Settings”. I did this over a year ago, and ever since I almost never notice any stutters.
I actually had an idea for a game, but needed funds to hire devs. Unfortunately my Kickstarter didn’t go anywhere, so it’ll never happen. I sort of wonder if that’s the case for most people who would be capable of getting the industry back on track. Willingness to do it, but no capital to fund a dev studio.