Unreal Engine 5.4 brings significant updates to ray tracing and rendering for 60 FPS gaming

Although it's an update aimed at game developers, 3D artists, and other creators who use Unreal Engine, the latest Unreal Engine 5.4 update is chock full of good news for gamers across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, especially for games that will fully utilize Unreal Engine 5's ray tracing and Nanite rendering capabilities.

Many of the updates and improvements are based on developers targeting 60 FPS, and this performance level is becoming the new norm for gamers. "With many developers targeting 60 Hz experiences, we've invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4," Epic writes.

This includes software variable rate shading (VRS) via Nanite, which will bring "substantial performance gains" to rendering while improving hardware ray-tracing (GPU instance culling has been added) and path-tracing performance. The update notes that ray tracing performance is sometimes improved by a factor of 2X.

The Unreal Engine 5.4 Feature Highlights above video shows how some of the new tech works using the recent (and super impressive) Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra story trailer. This is a new game from one of the creators of Sony's popular Uncharted franchise.

Unreal Engine 5.4 also improves the engine's inbuilt Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling tech, similar to DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. The TSR update improves overall performance and reduces image artifacts like ghosting while adding tools for developers to fine-tune and debug TSR implementations.

And for PC gamers, the latest update optimizes the shader compilation process to make it faster. The full release notes for Unreal Engine 5.4 are massive and go into the finer details of all the changes, improvements, and additions. Head here to read them all.