Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 4.22 with new features that expand the boundaries of photo-realistic and cinematic rendering quality in real time. Thanks to such functions as real time ray tracing and reducing build time by 165%, the new version of the engine allows you to get world-class content on any platform.

Unreal Engine 4.22 highlights:

1. Real-time ray tracing (Early Access)

Selective ray tracing works only where it is really needed to achieve subtle, precise effects that contribute to the realism of the scene, such as real world reflection and refraction, shadows in soft areas and environmental occlusion at incredible speed.

2. Simultaneous multi-user editing (Early Access)

Co-editing allows multiple developers to simultaneously make and view changes in the same Unreal Engine project, improving the collaboration of all team members.

3. Faster mesh drawing

UE 4.22's rendering code refactor significantly improves mesh drawing performance, with more aggressive caching of drawing information for static scene elements, and automatic instancing to merge draw calls where possible.

4. Faster C++ iterations

Unreal licensed Live ++ from Molecular Matters and integrated it as a new feature in Live Coding. UE 4.22 also optimizes the UnrealBuildTool and UnrealHeaderTool, significantly reducing the build time of the engine and leading to a 3-fold acceleration of iterations when making changes to the C ++ code.

5. Enhanced sound design

One of the new sound design tools is TimeSynth (early access) for managing sound clips with sample accuracy. Also the new version includes a spectral analyzer for Submixes, consistency of sound layers for better control of how many sounds will be reproduced simultaneously and spectral analytical baking.

Virtual Production Tools

6. New Composure UI

With the new UI in the built-in Unreal Composure tool, users can get real-time compositing capabilities directly in the Unreal Editor - ideal for on-set visualization.

7. Sequence Take Recorder

The new recorder allows users to record animations from the mocap associated with the characters in the scene, and from Live Link data for later playback, providing faster iteration and viewing of previous duplicates.

8. OpenColorIO (OCIO) color profiles

Unreal Engine now supports the Open Color IO platform for managing multiple color spaces in a movie, TV series, or animation project.

9. Hardware-accelerated video decoding (Experimental)

On Windows, new UE 4.22 can use a GPU to speed up the processing of H.264 video streams to reduce the load on the processor when playing video streams, resulting in smoother video and the use of video files with higher resolution.

10. New Media I/O Format

UE 4.22 comes with new features for professional I/O video formats, including 4K UHD inputs for AJA and Blackmagic. In addition, there is support for both 8-bit and 10-bit inputs, single-channel, dual-channel and four-channel, AJA Kona 5 devices, HDMI 2.0 and UHD input at high frame rates (up to 60 frames per second).

11. nDisplay improvements (Experimental)

Several new features make the nDisplay multi-screen rendering system more flexible by handling new types of hardware configurations and input data.

12. Animation Sharing

The new plugin reduces the total number of animations required for the crowd. It is based on the Master-Pose Component system, while at the same time adding mixing and additive animation states (Animation States) - segments for which animation instances are evaluated. The resulting poses are then transferred to all the child components that make up the group.

13. Microsoft HoloLens remote streaming support

UE 4.22 supports streaming to HoloLens, and full support is expected for HoloLens 2 in May 2019.

14. Google Stadia Support

Unreal Engine supports Stadia, Google's new streaming platform. Thanks to Unreal's cross-platform capabilities, developers can access Stadia features through familiar interfaces for consistent workflow on any device.

Epic Games also announced Chaos, a new physics system that debuts in Unreal Engine 4.23, the next update of the game engine.