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Unreal Engine 5.1 detailed, will attempt to fix shader compilation stutters


Epic Games has detailed the key features of the brand new iteration of Unreal Engine 5, Unreal Engine 5.1. According to the dev team, Unreal Engine 5.1 will bring numerous Nanite and Lumen improvements. Moreover, it will attempt to fix the annoying shader compilation stutters we’ve seen in a lot of Unreal Engine 4 games.

As Epic Games explained:

“With the increasing emphasis in UE5 on DX12 and Vulkan, we’re focusing attention on solving the problem of runtime hitches caused by Pipeline State Object creation, which is inherent to those RHIs. The previous solution required a PSO pre-caching process, which could be burdensome for large projects, and still leave gaps in the cache leading to hitches.

Automated PSO Gathering replaces the manual work required to collect all possible PSO combinations for a project, while at the same time keeping the number of PSOs as small as possible.”

Hopefully, Automated PSO Gathering will resolve the shader stuttering issues we’ve reported in the past. Theoretically, both STALKER 2 and Hellblade 2 won’t be using this new version of UE5. Thus, they won’t be able to take advantage of this feature. After all, both of these games are already in development, and there is no ETA on when Unreal Engine 5.1 will come out. So yeah, we can assume that there will be stutters in both of these two games.

Regarding Nanite, Unreal Engine 5.1 will add a programmable rasterization framework. Epic claims that this will open the door to features such as masked materials, two-sided foliage, pixel depth offset, and world position offset.

Lastly, Lumen will get performance optimizations in High scalability mode. The target here is for Lumen High to hit 60fps on current-gen consoles. Additionally, it will have improved support for foliage.

You can read more about the key features of Unreal Engine 5.1. here.

Stay tuned for more!