Epic Games has released a new version of the Unreal Engine 4. According to the company, this update brings this famous engine to its 4.11 version, and features major performance and multithreading improvements.
As Epic Games claimed, here are some of the major optimizations that are featured in Unreal Engine 4.11:
Parallelization. Multicore scaling is crucial to achieving high frame rates on modern PCs and consoles, so we have improved our threading architecture in several ways. We’ve reduced the cost of creating tasks, added support for high priority tasks, and removed many synchronization points.
Rendering performance. The renderer now does a better job balancing the size of its worker tasks and the command buffers generated for the GPU in order to achieve maximum parallelism without adding overhead on the GPU. We’ve also worked to remove synchronization points in the renderer so that we can better utilize all available cores.
Cloth simulation is now dramatically faster and makes better use of multi-threading. We now call the APEX solver directly for each asset from a worker thread. This allows for much better scheduling and eliminates many sync points and overhead. Clothing will now be updated after animation (when blending is not needed), otherwise after the skeletal mesh component updates.
Faster garbage collection. We now support garbage collection “clusters”, which allows the engine to treat groups of objects as a single unit, drastically reducing the number of objects that need to be considered. Currently, only subobjects for Materials and Particle Systems are clustered. Additionally, the mark and destroy phases are more cache-coherent, resulting in a 9x reduction in time, and memory churn has been reduced during reachability analysis.
Multi-threaded animation. Animation Graph updates can now run on worker threads allowing the number of animated characters to scale with the number of cores. Check out the Upgrade Notes as we’ve deprecated many animation related APIs and there are limitations on which animation graphs can run in worker threads.
Instant animation variable access. We’ve added a ‘fast-path’ for variable access in the Animation Graph update. This allows us to simply copy parameters internally rather than executing Blueprint code. The compiler can currently optimize the following constructs: member variables, negated boolean member variables, and members of a nested structure.
Additive animation ‘baking’. We now have an option to turn on baked additive animations. This makes using additive animations roughly3x faster. The work involved in calculating the delta pose for an additive animation is done at cook time rather than run time. This saves not only the calculation work involved in creating the additive deltas but also the memory accesses and allocations involved with decompressing the base animation which is no longer needed at runtime. This feature increases cook times, so you’ll need to enable it by setting the cvar “a.UseBakedAdditiveAnimations” to 1. Future versions of the engine will rework animation cooking to avoid this cost and permanently enable this optimization.
Unreal Engine 4.11 also features new realistic hair shading, new realistic eye shading, improved skin shading, realistic cloth shading, capsule shadows (very soft indirect shadows cast by a capsule representation of the character), particle depth of field, dithered opacity mask, dithered LOD crossfades and improved heirarchical LOD.
Furthermore, Unreal Engine 4.11 comes with improved DirectX 12 support.
“We’ve integrated updates to DirectX 12 in Unreal Engine from Microsoft to allow better CPU utilization while generating rendering commands in parallel; also added improvements like support for multiple root signatures, enabled asynchronous pipeline state disk cache by default, reduced memory footprint & fixed leaks, resource transitions optimizations, faster memory allocations and limited GPU starvation by flushing work during idle GPU time.”
You can download Unreal Engine 4.11 from its official website.
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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that’s the most inappropriate thumbnail you could use. That game is a disgrace, let alone Unreal’s engine sell point.
Fortunately if nothing else its extreme technical requirements are forcing Epic Games to push Unreal 4’s optimizations further & further, which helps all of us at the end of the day ^^
I hope it’s not for April Fools’ Day…
News have been reported long ago.
Slow DSOG.
UE4 is amazing.
You can show me all these fancy new shiny visuals and all but I’m just not buying into it until we see a load more games fully using the engine and throwing out as many amazing visualistic games as possible, ones that aren’t limited to a console, the only good looking game so far looks like Star Citizen, Kingdom come deliverance could be good but it’s releasing on current gen systems so sacrifices will have had to be made somewhere.
Yes, it’s a shame. Look at the Samaritan UE3 demo, we are just at this (or even a lower) level of graphics. And it’s been 5 years.
There is no remedy, as long as consoles exist you will never get the full benefit of the powerful hardware inside your PC.
“it’s a big shame that demos look 3 times better than actual games”
Shame? Weird word to use. Demos look great because o how small they are. People seem to forget about scale.
“If Pascal and Polaris aren’t a remedy for this stagnation”
Why would they do anything when the are just releasing this year?
“Shame? Weird word to use. Demos look great because o how small they are. People seem to forget about scale.”
That’s why those demos are misleading and can be just thrown away. Why even show them? They may as well pre-render the whole thing, it would reflect the plausibility of such looks in real games to the similar degree…
I’ve been misled by them many, many times now. I won’t believe in those loads of BS anymore, let me just ridicule people who are excited.
“Why would they do anything when the are just releasing this year?”
I’m not saying when, what I mean is that the new generation of cards may eventually either make games look way better or just find its use as a booster for ultra-demanding VR games.
But there’s one good thing: consoles are going to be divided just like PCs. I’m talking about PS4K and its “green” counterpart.
This gives hope for less PC visuals hampering.
Even so I’m still not seeing current gen multiplats giving us PC only type visuals, even the engines they show off won’t be tapped until we get a PC only game and really SC is the only current one we have.
Good thing SC is gonna use DX12 eventually. But probably games which weren’t crafted with it in mind from beginning won’t use its full potential.
I remember Chris Roberts talking about this, the reason its taking so long ist hey want to implement it at the lowest level. This would require rewriting the entire renderer. Its a pretty big undertaking, and there will be some caveats since yes, it was originally intended for DX11. However I’m confident they can bring something to the table that’ll be widely beneficial.
So you’re suggesting that we push a console to it’s limits despite the fact current gen can’t even maintain complete 100% 1080p 60fps to it’s limits, that would make us a way better game than say a PC only game like SC?, I am really confused because I don’t see how pushing a console that is already at it’s limits, is going to make us a PC only game look miles better, just on PC with no multiplat.
I mean we can look at that one event they showed us but I;m here and still looking at 2 and a half years worth of games that still haven’t pushed the envelope and still haven’t given PC a ton of games like SC, so far we’ve got 1 and a half if we count KCD but even then that’s multiplat by design.
Wait so consoles and |PC are now all going to use DX 12 to push some massive limits?.
I honestly don’t see why we need off the shelf consoles to help us get the visuals for a PC game, let alone a single API and not say others.
I just don’t see how we need consoles in order to make really good PC only games that won’t ever run on consoles.
So if they master obsolete hardware, then we won’t have to upgrade for like 20 years with each mastery?.
I know how it all works but I;m finding it zany to believe that some devs have to master obsolete off the shelf hardware to give us what SE teases us with what we could get for a game, all without having to use new hardware at all. Last time I checked we advance with tech like we advance with everything, we don’t master something and stick with the same tech for decades and decades, we’ve mastered the art of making phones and yet we get new ones each year, we don’t need to stick with the same phone for say 10-20 years.
I just don’t believe that to get PC only games, we need console only devs to master an API and then make game only for PC to give us what PC can do, that just sounds too forced and insane.
Xbone isn’t, however PS4 already uses a low level API which basically they had to even unlock one of the dev cores for a bit more performance. PS4 provides a bit more resolution and performance compared to xbone, however its still not all that much.
DX12 will help Xbone compete against PS4, however when comparing both to PC it still isn’t much.
Thats actually very interesting if its the case. I know Sony has done a few updates during the PS4’s lifespan thus far to optimize their API. Would be interesting to see that continue.
+1 for vulkan.
Considering that the vast majority of PC gamers are running a 1920 or less monitor and a $200 or less graphics card, it does not really matter all these extra bells and whistles. The same goes for consoles. SONY is making a mistake with their PS4.5 as it will cut down on sales of the PS4 which 40 million people find it to be a perfectly good gaming console. So what that it cannot do 1080P all the time. It plays games and looks good. Good is good enough.
I’ve been playing a lot of Paragon lately and it already looks amazing, the only difference from the trailer is texture quality.
I would like to know when is Paragon going to use these new features it it’s not already in the next patch.
ark survival can you see this?
Read the article before posting.
get a clew before posting.
talk as if you know any better than Epic or Nvidia.
“Thanks for the suggestion, but I’d rather not.”
you just did.
and there’s nothing in that article to back up your rants, just more updates & improvements to an already impressive engine.