Epic Games announces improvements in Unreal Engine 5.1

Epic Games promises in the public roadmap for Unreal Engine 5.1, among other things, improved optimization of the engine’s Lumen lighting system. Furthermore, improvements should be made in that engine version for the Nanite system and an automated pso system.

The upcoming first major update to Unreal Engine 5 since its release in April will focus, among other things, on the performance of the engine on current consoles. In the public roadmapwith no indication of a concrete release date, Epic Games says it wants to optimize the lighting engine to achieve the predetermined target of 60 frames per second on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S in the High scalability mode.

Lighting that interacts with leaves and plants would also be improved, and Epic Games would add reflections for single-layer water and support for high-quality reflections on transparent materials. Lumen also gets a first variant of split screen support with Unreal Engine version 5.1.

Furthermore, Epic Games promises a framework for gridding geometry for the Nanite part of Unreal Engine 5. This allows for things like “masked materials, double-sided foliage, and differences in pixel depth.” Epic promises to reveal more details about Nanite 5.1 later.

Finally, the developer says in the roadmap to enable automated pipelinestate object collection to fix stuttering images. So far, precaching is needed to compile a list of shaders to render. This would cause performance problems in large projects, while sometimes certain assignments were accidentally not included. This process is automatic in the latest version of the engine, whereby the number of pso’s is also kept as low as possible. This should reduce the amount of preloaded pso’s, which should improve the performance of projects based on Unreal Engine 5.