Unreal Engine 5.2, the latest version of Epic’s engine, contains a number of features that promise to improve performance and reduce the stuttering issues that plague the vast majority of Unreal Engine 4 games.
In a new video, Digital Foundry takes a closer look at some of the new features introduced in the latest version of the engine, released a few months ago, and emphasizes that the improvements made to procedural generation will not only make it easier for developers to populate the environment, but also improve performance, thanks to software a version of Lumen that performs better than the hardware Lumen while still delivering high image quality, though not as high.
One of the biggest improvements in 5.2, as noted in Digital Foundry’s analysis, is improved shader compilation behavior. In particular, the latest version of the engine has improved asynchronous shader compilation, introduced in version 5.1, which eliminates the biggest stutters, providing much better smoothness. Unfortunately, this is not enough to completely get rid of stutters, since they are still present during the bypass.
Another interesting point that Digital Foundry points out is that the engine does not yet scale very well on processors with a large number of cores and threads, which is disappointing, given that such processors will become more widespread in the future.
