Some of the features introduced in Unreal Engine 5.4, such as renderer parallelization, bring considerable performance improvements, although frame-time stability still leaves something to be desired.
The tech experts at Digital Foundry took a good look at the latest version of the engine by Epic released to the public last month, highlighting some of the key improvements in performance and visual quality. In regards to performance, the new renderer parallelization introduced in the new version of the engine can bring around 40% performance improvement in CPU-limited scenarios on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D on PC over version 5.0 in the Matrix Awakens demo. This also bodes well for consoles, as a PC attempting to replicate the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X specs sees considerable performance improvement in Unreal Engine 5.4 over version 5.0.
While Unreal Engine 5.4 brings significant performance improvements, stability still leaves something to be desired. Fortnite running on the latest version of the engine, using a combination of automatic asynchronous shader caching and shader compilation, stutters considerably, as does the Matrix Awakens demo. These stutters are even more noticeable in the latest version of the engine due to a greater disparity in frame times.
More information on the Unreal Engine 5.4 can be found on its official website.
