This week, Epic Games published an updated Unreal Engine 5.1 roadmap that is filled with exciting improvements coming to the popular game creation software.

　　To begin with, the engineers are attempting to fix those dreadful stuttering hitches that often plague Unreal Engine 4+ games. Unreal Engine 5.1 is getting an Automated PSO Gathering feature to help with this long-standing issue.

　　With the increasing emphasis in UE5 on DX12 and Vulkan, we're focusing attention on solving the problem of runtime hitches caused by Pipeline State Object creation, which is inherent to those RHIs. The previous solution required a PSO pre-caching process, which could be burdensome for large projects and still leave gaps in the cache leading to hitches.

　　Automated PSO Gathering replaces the manual work required to collect all possible PSO combinations for a project while at the same time keeping the number of PSOs as small as possible.

　　Of course, this fix won't be available for the many Unreal Engine 4 games still in development, but at least we can hope that future titles using Unreal Engine 5.1+ won't suffer from the issue any longer.

　　This is only one of many improvements planned by Epic for the new Unreal Engine 5 version. The engine's most exciting new features, Lumen and Nanite, will both receive various enhancements.

Lumen

Nanite

　　Other updates include:

　　Nanite material switch in the Material EditorAdditional diagnostic and debug modesMany quality and performance improvementsThere's more, including various improvements to GPU Lightmass, Path Tracing, Niagara, and Chaos Cloth. Unreal Engine 5.1 doesn't have a release date yet, nor do any of the games made with it (except Epic's own Fortnite), but in the meantime, you can watch this remake of the Unreal Engine 4 Elemental demo.