Unreal Engine 5.4 released with enhancements to Nanite, machine learning and performance

Epic Games, the developer behind the esteemed Unreal Engine, has announced the release of version 5.4. This latest iteration equips game developers with the very tools used in-house for the creation of Fortnite Chapter 5, Rocket Racing, Fortnite Festival, and LEGO Fortnite.

Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces significant enhancements to the engine's integrated animation toolset, allowing for direct character rigging and animation authoring within Unreal Engine, eliminating the need for external applications. The previously experimental motion matching feature is now ready for production use, providing an expandable framework for animation features based on a large database of captured animation.

The update also brings improvements to Nanite, Unreal Engine 5's virtualized micropolygon geometry system. An experimental Tessellation feature has been added, enabling the incorporation of fine details such as cracks and bumps at render time, without any modification to the original mesh. Software Variable Rate Shading (VRS) has been introduced via Nanite compute materials, yielding significant performance boosts.

Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) has also seen enhancements in stability and performance, ensuring consistent output across different target platforms. Additionally, Unreal Engine 5.4 boasts improved rendering performance, an updated Movie Render Queue, and a beta version of a neural network engine.

The release also includes Unreal Cloud DDC, a self-hosted cloud storage system for Unreal Engine Derived Data Cache (DDC). Other improvements include enhancements to multi-process cook, the Unreal Build Accelerator, motion graphics, virtual production, cloth simulation, and Linux support.