Unreal Engine 5.2 Out Now – Adds Improvements to Anti-Stuttering System, Enhances Lumen and Nanite

Today, Epic Games announced the public release of Unreal Engine 5.2, the next major version of the third-party engine of choice for most triple-A game developers.

Unreal Engine 5.2 comes with many new features and improvements. Let’s lead with what’s plagued many PC games lately, chiefly made with Unreal Engine 4: stuttering.

The previous release, UE 5.1, had introduced an experimental PSO precaching system to improve hitching in DirectX12 games. In UE 5.2, the performance and stability have been increased, and the system now supports skipping drawing objects altogether if the relative PSOs aren’t ready yet. While the goal is to have them ready, there is no guarantee they will be. With the new support for skipping, the stuttering shouldn’t happen if the PSO hasn’t been compiled.

Epic also reduced the number of caches to compile in Unreal Engine 5.2 thanks to improved logic that smartly finds those that would never actually be used. Lastly in this area, the old manual caching system can now be used alongside the automated precaching one.

Unfortunately, it may take a while before game developers switch to the new version to take advantage of these additions.

The virtualized geometry system Nanite has received some improvements, too. There is now support for Custom Depth and Stencils, Lighting Channels, and Global Clip Plane; Variable Precision Normals are available to create, for instance, high-quality reflections on cars; and the Nanite Streamer, which fetches geometry data from the disk, has had its performance, stability, and statistics improved.

Lumen, the other major UE5 feature, benefits from improved global illumination and occlusion for thin geometry (such as ears) on characters, and the hair grooms are integrated more seamlessly. High-quality reflections on translucency have received material roughness support (they were limited to mirror-only) in Unreal Engine 5.2, and software ray tracing now defaults to using Asynchronous Compute for consoles. Hardware ray tracing now supports two-sided foliage and can better approximate secondary bounces for reflections.

Epic also added Async Compute support for inline ray tracing passes, and ray traced shadows for Rect Lights and lights with a source size are more accurate in this new version.

Rough surface rendering for human skin types has been improved. Moreover, Unreal Engine 5.2 expands Variable Rate Shading (VRS) from XR devices to desktop and adds Contrast Adaptive Shading (CAS) to analyze the previous frame and better understand which areas should be rendered at reduced shading rates.

Game developers are also likely to appreciate big new features like the Procedural Content Generation Framework, which is useful to quickly populate large areas or even worlds after defining rules and parameters, and Substrate, a brand new tool that replaced the standard suite of shading models with a modular framework that supports a wider range of surface appearances, capable of providing a better layered look.

You can read the full release notes here.