Epic Games promises in the public roadmap for Unreal Engine 5.1, among other things, improved optimization of the engine’s Lumen light system. Furthermore, in that engine version improvements should be made for the Nanite system and an automated pso system.
The upcoming first major update to Unreal Engine 5 since its April release focuses on the performance of the engine on current consoles, among other things. In the public roadmapwith no indication of a concrete release date, Epic Games says it wants to optimize the light engine to achieve the predetermined target of 60 frames per second on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S in High scalability mode.
Also, the lighting interacting with leaves and plates would be improved and Epic Games will add water reflections of one layer and support for high quality reflections on translucent materials. Lumen will also receive a first variant of split screen support with Unreal Engine version 5.1.
Furthermore, for the Nanite portion of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games promises a framework for lattice geometry. This allows 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 pipeline state object collection to resolve stuttering images. So far, precaching is needed to list shaders to be rendered. This would cause performance problems on large projects, while sometimes certain assignments were accidentally omitted. That process is automatic in the latest version of the engine, while the amount of PSOs is also kept as low as possible. This should reduce the amount of preloaded PSOs, which should improve the performance of projects based on Unreal Engine 5.