Epic announced a slate of new features for UnrealEngine5 during its State of Unreal address, but the most important update flew under the radar.
This story is part of Jacob Roach's ReSpec series, covering the world of PC gaming and hardware. During its State of Unreal address at GDC 2023, Epic announced a wide-ranging suite of features for Unreal Engine 5.2. But perhaps the most important feature coming in the updated engine doesn’t relate to lighting, geometry detail, or ray tracing. It’s all about performance.
You’ll typically hear about shader compilation stuttering, but recent sources of hitches aren’t due to individual shaders. In recent graphics APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12, packages known as Pipeline State Objects are leveraged to tell the game about the state of your GPU. PSOs are meant to make rendering more efficient, allowing dozens of parameters, including shaders, to be interfaced between the API and the GPU in a single package.
Epic is attempting to automate this process by gathering PSOs rather than leaving it to developers to account for every possible GPU parameter. It’s on Epic’s public road map, but only an experimental version is available now. In Unreal Engine 5.2, the goal is to improve PSO caching to further reduce hitches.
Although I’m happy to see Epic addressing the issue directly, we haven’t seen the automatic PSO cache in process yet. As more complicated, varied releases come out from smaller teams, the demand for PSO generation goes up, and the possibility of hitches and stutters becomes more present. Lumen leverages ray tracing, but it’s a highly optimized form of ray tracing. Instead of painstakingly calculating infinite bounces on detailed objects, Lumen uses abstractions to calculate lighting for most of the scene, only defaulting to detailed lighting closest to the camera. This optimization allows Lumen to run with software ray tracing, ditching the need to have dedicated ray tracing accelerators on your graphics card.
More importantly, Nanite runs on its own rendering pass, so it’s not caught up in the traditional GPU pipeline. That means that your gameplay remains smooth even when Nanite is swapping out mesh complexity. Between Nanite and Lumen, you have two visually impressive, computationally efficient features that raise the bar for graphical fidelity.
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