Epic Games Introduces Unreal Engine 5.2

[T0@st]

We're excited to announce that Unreal Engine 5.2 is now available. With this release, we've further expanded UE5's groundbreaking toolset as it continues to deliver on the promise of making Unreal Engine the most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool in the world. Alongside feature refinements and stability improvements, Unreal Engine 5.2 pushes the boundaries of what creators can expect out of the box, delivering innovative new functionality.

Procedural Content Generation framework
Unreal Engine 5.2 offers an early look at a Procedural Content Generation framework (PCG) that can be used directly inside Unreal Engine without relying on external packages. The framework includes both in-editor tools and a runtime component. The PCG tools enable you to define rules and parameters to populate large scenes with Unreal Engine assets of your choice, making the process of creating large worlds fast and efficient.



The runtime component means that the system can run inside a game or other real-time application, so that the world can react to gameplay or geometry changes. The PCG tools can also be used for linear content requiring substantial numbers of assets, such as large architectural projects or film scenes. This is an Experimental feature that will be further developed over future releases.



What's new in Unreal Engine 5.2?
Unreal Engine 5.2 further expands UE5's groundbreaking toolset with some innovative new functionality—including a Procedural Content Generation framework and Substrate material authoring—alongside feature refinements and stability improvements.

Substrate
This release also introduces Substrate, a new way of authoring materials that gives you more control over the look and feel of objects used in real-time applications, such as games, and for linear content creation. When enabled, it replaces the fixed suite of shading models with a more expressive and modular multi-lobe framework that provides a greater range of surface appearances and a wider parameter space from which to work. It is especially powerful for describing layered looks, for example "liquid on metal" or "dust on clear coat."



To test out Substrate, you can enable it in the project settings. As an Experimental feature, we do not recommend using it for production work; we welcome feedback to continue to refine its functionality.

Enhanced virtual production toolset
With this release, the virtual production toolset continues to receive new features and enhancements that give filmmakers more creative power. Dovetailing with the desktop ICVFX Editor, a new iOS app for ICVFX stage operations (coming soon for iPad via the Apple App Store) will offer an intuitive touch-based interface for stage operations such as color grading, light card placement, and nDisplay management tasks from anywhere within the LED volume. This puts creative control directly in the filmmakers' hands to achieve the desired look where filming is actually taking place, without having to call back to the Unreal Engine operators.



Meanwhile, enhancements to Unreal Engine's VCam system offer filmmakers greater scope for creative decision-making during pre-production. These include the new ability to operate multiple simultaneous Virtual Cameras off a single editor instance, as well as to create more sophisticated and layered camera moves.

Finally, extended nDisplay support for SMPTE 2110 builds on the initial groundwork laid in Unreal Engine 5.1 toward the next generation of ICVFX hardware deployment. This Experimental feature is suitable for testing in Unreal Engine 5.2 as hardware becomes available, with production viability targeted for Unreal Engine 5.3.

Apple Silicon support
Native support for Apple Silicon has been added to the Unreal Editor. This brings a better user experience, improved performance, and greater stability. The Universal Binary of Unreal Engine that natively supports both Apple Silicon and Intel CPUs is now available to download from the Epic Games launcher.



New ML Deformer sample
Explore how Unreal Engine machine learning technology can be used to create a high-fidelity real-time character for PC and consoles with deformations driven by full muscle, flesh, and cloth simulation with this new ML Deformer sample. The download includes an interactive demo sequence that shows muscles bulging and sliding under the skin, and folds forming on clothing. You can also compare the results with ML Deformer on and off, and animate the model with the included Control Rig asset.



The package includes source assets for you to repurpose and modify for use in your projects. Get the sample here.

And there's more…
These are just some of the new features and enhancements in Unreal Engine 5.2. Check out the release notes to see the full feature list.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Arco]

Cool. But when will we see games use it .

 

[Easo]

Cool. But when will we see games use it .

It just came out. Give it half a year or so for.

 

[cvaldes]

Cool. But when will we see games use it .

It is likely that Fortnite will be one of the first games to use Unreal Engine 5.2. It is already running UE5. In fact, it is likely there is a Fortnite alpha running UE5.2 internally which Epic used to test out new features.

Since Fortnite is free-to-play, you have the ability to try it out yourself on your system.

If there is any piece of software that needs to run Unreal Engine well, it would be Epic Games' cash cow.

 

[HeadRusch1]

I think he means *any* games that aren't demos or Fortnight.......and I'm with 'em on that sentiment. I look forward to the first Unreal Engine 5 games that blow my socks off with their ability to cripple any PC hardware or push my XBox Series X to its limits by running every game at 900p and 30fps...but they will look damned pretty.....

 

[Solaris17]

Man this is so cool. I wish I was artistic in the slightest or even understood what some of the options did. What a cool tool.

 

[HisDivineOrder]

Did they fix traversal stutter and making sure every developer compiles shaders before the gameplay begins? Or did they just gloss over that to make more impressive screenshots again? Because at this point, with the sheer amount of #StutterStruggle gamers are dealing with, nobody cares about anything they're doing except their fixes for these problems.

 

[THU31]

As long as it can use more than two cores and pre-compile all shaders.

But it definitely smells like 30 FPS.

 

[chrcoluk]

Ahh stutter engine 5.2 out.

 

[64K]

Ahh stutter engine 5.2 out.

Traversal Stutters and Shader Compilation Stutter aren't bugs. They are features of Unreal Engine.

I hope Epic fixed this crap with Unreal Engine 5.2

 

[Easo]

It is likely that Fortnite will be one of the first games to use Unreal Engine 5.2. It is already running UE5. In fact, it is likely there is a Fortnite alpha running UE5.2 internally which Epic used to test out new features.

Since Fortnite is free-to-play, you have the ability to try it out yourself on your system.

If there is any piece of software that needs to run Unreal Engine well, it would be Epic Games' cash cow.

In fact Fortnite is running 5.1 already and, IIRC, did it just few months after it was released.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Traversal Stutters and Shader Compilation Stutter aren't bugs. They are features of Unreal Engine.

I hope Epic fixed this crap with Unreal Engine 5.2

Considering Fortnite still stutters for a lot of people I doubt that is the case. #StutterStruggle is here to stay.

 

[mama]

I wonder how easy it is for a game developer to transition from 5.1 to 5.2?

 

[Wye]

I got the editor and I tried to open a sample project. After 3-4 hours it was still compiling assets on a i9K processor.
Definitely not a fast to learn & start environment. You will need an extreme workstation and you will still need to wait many many hours for anything you try to do.
The development environment is not easy to understand and use, you will need to pay your developers a small fortune to be able to develop stuff in it.

 

[LabRat 891]

*MW6 on UE 5.2?
plox and spanx.
*Basically MW3 re-make/pre-quel, but a LOT bigger in scale.

related: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-new-mechwarrior-game-is-coming-in-2024/

 

[Lew Zealand]

Considering Fortnite still stutters for a lot of people I doubt that is the case. #StutterStruggle is here to stay.

Play in DX11, fewer stutters.

I played on a 4790/1050 Ti yesterday at 1080p/100 so ancient stuff, but it was fun. I don't remember many stutters, I was just playing the game so if there were some they weren't intrusive. Maybe I'll try again and pay closer attention but I only play a match every 3-4 months or so for the hell of it, so we'll see...

 

[Minus Infinity]

Traversal Stutters and Shader Compilation Stutter aren't bugs. They are features of Unreal Engine.

No not really. It isn't the way the engine is designed so much as it's to do with shader cache. This is a basic analysis of the root cause:

Many of today's issues stem directly from the DirectX12 and Vulkan graphics APIs. "The (stuttering) problem is caused by DX12, Vulkan PSO (Pipeline State Object) compilation. When a game loads a shader for the first time, GPU drivers begin compilation causing hitches. Devs spend a lot of time replaying the same scene, so tend to miss PSO compile related hitching."

The main thing you need to know for this problem to make sense is that your graphics card will compile and store shaders once a game uses them for the first time. This is why using a new ability or entering a new area is most likely to cause stuttering: the game's basically caught off guard and takes a few hundred milliseconds to pull the new shader out of its pocket. There are other reasons games can stutter, but this is one of the most common culprits right now, and is why stuttering will be at its worst early in a game and lessen over time as you build up a shader compilation.

Why is Unreal Engine 4 so notorious, then? The engine has a feature in place to cache shaders and prevent those stutter-causing in-the-moment shader calls, but it doesn't cover everything.


Basically if you optimise the game so that shaders and otther assets are pre-cached before the game needs them you will get a smooth gameplay. There's an Unreal 4 engined game called Hi Fi Rush, that runs very smoothly because they took time to go beyond how the engine normally works in tuning it for their game. Otherdevs should do the same thing.

 

[LabRat 891]

No not really. It isn't the way the engine is designed so much as it's to do with shader cache. This is a basic analysis of the root cause:

Basically if you optimise the game so that shaders and otther assets are pre-cached before the game needs them you will get a smooth gameplay. There's an Unreal 4 engined game called Hi Fi Rush, that runs very smoothly because they took time to go beyond how the engine normally works in tuning it for their game. Otherdevs should do the same thing.

So, what I'm reading is:
"DirectStorage" would magically fix all of these issues, if ever broadly implemented."

 

[64K]

The (stuttering) problem is caused by DX12, Vulkan PSO (Pipeline State Object) compilation. When a game loads a shader for the first time, GPU drivers begin compilation causing hitches. Devs spend a lot of time replaying the same scene, so tend to miss PSO compile related hitching.

But they don't miss the tens of thousands of complaints about stuttering in UE4 games and they don't miss the fact that they get tasked with trying to fix these same issues over and over again after release of the games. My point is that they know very well that the stuttering is an issue but imo they aren't given enough time to address the issues because the Publishers don't allow them the time to do what needs to be done.

I'm not a programmer and I don't have a clue if the Traversal Stuttering and Shader Compilation Stuttering can even be fixed with UE4 games but I hope that UE5.2 can at least lessen the stuttering.

 

[skates]

It seems odd to me that in 2023 with a modern game engine there would be an issue with prefetching and caching shaders. My simpleton mind thinks that if this is true, then install the game and have an option to pre-compile all shadors one time which would eliminate the need to compile on the fly. May take up more room and may take up a little more time to cache/load them, so maybe doesn't make sense.

 

[THU31]

It seems odd to me that in 2023 with a modern game engine there would be an issue with prefetching and caching shaders. My simpleton mind thinks that if this is true, then install the game and have an option to pre-compile all shadors one time which would eliminate the need to compile on the fly. May take up more room and may take up a little more time to cache/load them, so maybe doesn't make sense.

My simpleton mind doesn't understand the need to compile shaders at all, at least for every single GPU and every single driver. "It should just work". Seems like a fundamental flaw in the design. It should work just like compiled binaries for applications, which run on every CPU and OS that supports them.
It negates the whole point of an API if you have to do something for each specific hardware. And if this is the cost of having lower-level access via DX12/Vulkan, then maybe it was a bad idea to invent these APIs in the first place. I'd rather never have ray-tracing or complex CPU simulations without bottlenecks if that means having to suffer constant stutters.

This engine has the worst CPU bottlenecks anyway, so what is the point of DX12?

 

[skates]

My simpleton mind doesn't understand the need to compile shaders at all, at least for every single GPU and every single driver. "It should just work". Seems like a fundamental flaw in the design. It should work just like compiled binaries for applications, which run on every CPU and OS that supports them.
It negates the whole point of an API if you have to do something for each specific hardware. And if this is the cost of having lower-level access via DX12/Vulkan, then maybe it was a bad idea to invent these APIs in the first place. I'd rather never have ray-tracing or complex CPU simulations without bottlenecks if that means having to suffer constant stutters.

This engine has the worst CPU bottlenecks anyway, so what is the point of DX12?

Agreed. I also worked for a game company that wrote their own mouse drivers in Assembly, drove the QA department crazy.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Already UE5.2 and still ZERO quality games out there.
Is this a joke??