Epic Games has recently offered its Unreal Engine 5.3 as a preview via its in-house Epic Games Launcher, and the revised final version of the game engine is now in the starting blocks. Once again, the geometry pipeline “Nanite”, the all-round solution for ray tracing “Lumen” and advanced path tracing will receive new optimizations. The new version 5.3 follows the two releases of versions 5.1 and 5.2 of the Unreal Engine.
Once again, the focus is on the engine’s own driving forces, as officially documented by the Unreal Engine Public Roadmap.
Nanite gets edge calculation improvements
Especially for the “Nanite” geometry pipeline, the calculation of edges in the so-called Nanite process is to be significantly improved. So far it could happen in some cases that when cluster swapping, i.e. when one nanite cluster is replaced by another, the triangles along hard edges were softened and therefore blurred.
The new feature can be activated individually for each Nanite mesh, but according to Epic Games it is associated with an approximately 10 percent increase in memory requirements. However, hard edges in particular should also be displayed correctly in nanite meshes with a low geometry density. The Nanite landscapes represent a new and interesting feature set. Up to now, landscapes were excluded from the Nanite process, which changes version 5.3.
Lumen allows reflections within reflections
For the Unreal Engine 5.3, the all-round ray tracing solution “Lumen” has been significantly improved in the area of reflections. Thanks to the optimizations, Lumen can now also carry out the reflections of several so-called “bounces” for the first time and thus also display reflections in reflections correctly.
In addition, the entire lumen model has been split up so that in future the lumen reflections can also be activated and deactivated independently of the lumen lighting. Epic Games also promises to have significantly improved Lumen’s hardware acceleration with Unreal Engine 5.3.
More improvements in Unreal Engine 5.3
The upcoming Unreal Engine 5.3 should contain the following innovations in addition to the optimizations and improvements with regard to “Nanite” and “Lumen”, as can be seen from the official roadmap.
Source: EpicGames
