Epic's latest version of Unreal Engine 5, 5.3, is now available for public download, following months of preview. Unreal Engine 5.3 includes enhancements to core rendering, developer iteration, virtual product toolsets, experimental new rendering, animation, and simulation capabilities.
While UE5 has been out for a while, it will be some time before we see game developers who take full advantage of it. Unreal 5 games launched this year include Relics 2, Layers of Fear, Legends of the Immortals, and more. In particular, Legends of the Immortals, which leverages the next gen features of UE5 the most, but at the same time heavily sacrifices the game's performance.
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Unreal Engine 5.3 is now available!
We're excited to announce that Unreal Engine 5.3 is now available. We're constantly expanding the capabilities and potential of UE5 to game developers and creators across industries. In this release, we've brought a ton of improvements across the board.
In addition to enhancing the toolsets for core rendering, developer iteration, and virtual production, we've introduced experimental new features for rendering, animation, and simulation, giving you the opportunity to test extended creative workflows in UE5 and reduce the need to repeatedly switch to external apps.
What's new in Unreal Engine 5.3
Improvements to UE5 core rendering features
With this release, we've continued to improve all of UE5's core rendering features to achieve our long-standing goal: to make it easier and more efficient for developers to leverage them for games running at 60fps on next-gen consoles. These improvements also provide better results and more powerful performance for linear content creators.
Specifically, Nanite has faster performance when working with mask materials such as vegetation, and the new Explicit Tangent option further expands the types of surfaces it can render; On the other hand, Lumen, which uses hardware ray tracing, has also expanded its capabilities, including support for multiple reflections, as well as faster performance on the host.
Other areas where significant improvements have been made include Virtual Shadow Mapping (VSM) (now available in production), Timing Super Resolution (TSR), Fur Groom, Path Tracing, and Substrate.
Multi-process baking
Another useful improvement is that when converting content from UE's internal format to a platform-specific format, developers can now take advantage of additional CPU and memory resources, drastically reducing the time it takes to get baked output from a build farm server or local workstation.
When multi-process baking is enabled, child processes start, performing part of the baking work together with the main process. Developers can choose how many child processes they want to run on a machine.
Cinema camera binding guides
The new Cinematic Camera Rig Rail Actors now enable filmmakers to simulate the workflow and results of a traditional camera moving a lens along a track or on a camera cart.
Cinematic camera rig rails provide finer control than existing rigging guides, including arranging settings such as camera rotation angle, focal length, and focus distance at different control points in the path. It supports both in-editor and virtual camera workflows.
Improvements to virtual cameras
Speaking of virtual cameras, improvements to the system in this version include: the ability to review shot test shots directly on the iPad for faster iteration; Simultaneous transmission of different virtual camera outputs to different team members (e.g., outputs provided to camera operators have camera controls and directors do not), facilitating collaborative shooting of virtual cameras; Record at a slower frame rate and then play back at normal speed to make it easier to capture fast-moving motion.
Experimental features
In addition to these updates to the core toolset, Unreal Engine 5.3 introduces many exciting experimental new features that we hope to further improve in future releases. You're welcome to try them out and send us feedback, but at this time we don't recommend using these features in a production environment.
Cinematic volumetric rendering
Two new features, Sparse Volume Texture (SVT) and Heterogeneous Volume Path Tracing, introduce a range of new capabilities to enable volumetric effects such as smoke and fire.
Sparse volume textures store baked simulation data representing volumetric media, which you can simulate in Niagara or import from OpenVDB (.vdb) files created by other 3D applications.
In addition, as an experimental feature in the Path Tracer, we now have more comprehensive support for render volumes. This allows you to deliver high-quality volumetric renderings (including global illumination, shadows, and scattering) directly in UE5 for movies, movies, TV series, and other forms of linear content production.
