A new Unreal Engine 5.4 comparison video was shared online today, highlighting the differences in reflections quality over the previous version of the engine.
The comparison video put together by JSFILMZ does a great job highlighting how the deprecated standalone ray tracing features, including ray-traced reflections, may impact quality. Using the same sequence with the same setting in a hardware accelerated scenario, JSFILMZ demonstrated how using the new Screen Traces option, which seems to use screen space reflections, results in worse reflections quality than in Unreal Engine 5.3 using ray-traced reflections.
Unreal Engine 5.4 was officially released yesterday, introducing several improvements, such as the new Nanite Adaptive Tessellation option, Heterogenous Volumes, which can produce realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds, improved Temporal Super Resolution upscaling, easier implementation of AI and machine learning tools and more. The new version of the engine also brings improved performance and shader compilation.
“With many developers targeting 60 Hz experiences, we’ve invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4. This includes refactoring the systems to enable a greater degree of parallelization, as well as adding GPU instance culling to hardware ray tracing, which also now benefits from additional primitive types and an optimized Path Tracer. Further optimizations have been made to shader compilation, resulting in a notable improvement in project cook times.
More information on the Unreal Engine 5.4 can be found on its official website.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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