Release Notes
This page tracks what is in the current major release, what is actively in progress, and what is planned. Feature lists are cumulative — everything under "Shipped" is present in the current release branch.
Branch layout
Branch | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Current major release. This is what you should build against. |
| Integration branch. Backports and features land here first. |
| Previous major release, kept for projects mid-milestone. |
Feature branches | Work in progress on a single system, merged when stable. |
Work-in-progress changes belong on a branch, not on release. See Commit and PR Conventions.
Shipped
Physics
Vite PhysX 3.4 as the shipping physics backend.
Library upgrade for compatibility with newer Clang versions and the latest Android NDK Clang, producing a meaningful performance increase — up to 2x in stress tests, typically around 1.4x faster in the Box Container Pile 10 test.
PhysX Blast working alongside Apex Destruction.
PhysX Fixed Timestep as an opt-in feature, fully guarded for zero overhead on the regular path.
Rendering
Callisto BRDF shading model: single- and dual-lobe GGX specular with specular Fresnel falloff.
Toon shading model, inspired by Guilty Gear.
HBAO+ ambient occlusion.
Compute-based SMAA.
Improved FXAA with a higher image quality option.
Updated TAA for better temporal resolve.
DLSS 4.5, FSR 2, FSR 4, XeSS, NIS and AMD Anti-Lag 2 ported and integrated.
Engine-side DLSS rendering support improvements.
Improved DDGI, including performance work on RT reflections.
SSAO fast path and a significantly cheaper SSAO.
TressFX hair integration.
Localized IBL.
Improved ACES colour reproduction.
Rendering optimisations across RHI, RT direct lighting, RT shadows, geometry collections, drawing, eye adaptation and shadow/light draw distance, plus AMD optimisations targeted at consoles.
Software occlusion, which was removed after 4.27 upstream.
Nintendo Switch specialised renderer base, which UE 5.0+ removed.
CPU and core
CPU optimisations for containers, friends usage, hash maps, NavMesh, volumetric clouds, the game thread, the task graph, SIMD, animation systems, texture handling, streaming and audio systems.
Optimised runtimes for skeletal meshes and actors.
Updated classes for easier backporting of UE5 codebases (game framework and containers).
Gameplay Ability System updates.
Oodle updates.
Modernised console systems.
Build, tooling and content
Full merge of UE 4.27 Plus, NvRTX 4.27, NvRTX 5.0, DLSS, TressFX, FSR and AMD patches.
Over 300 backports from UE 5.0 through the 5.8 era.
MSVC toolchain compliance up to 14.50 & SDK 10.0.26100 (Visual Studio 2026).
Shader compilation improvements.
Debloated runtime PSOs in Shipping configuration.
Editor loading improvements and editor quality-of-life backports.
Project default plugin debloat.
Batch tooling to produce installed engine builds and debloat the tree.
Bundled plugins: FSR, Motion Symphony, Houdini, ACL, Kawaii Physics, PhysX Instanced Subsystem, Splash Damage Ability System, ImGui and ImGui Tools, and others. See Bundled Plugins.
ImGui integration with benchmarking tools.
Large volume of toolchain updates, C++ modernisation, faster cooking, engine fixes, resolved memory leaks and stall fixes.
Mobile improvements and fixes.
In progress
Flat UI redesign, closer to UE5's visual language.
Integration of Multi-Threaded FLECS ECS library with Unreal Actors interaction.
Full C++20 support.
Further UE5 backport integration — roughly 1,000 backports pending promotion to release.
Rendering features: improved mesh handling, GI, shading models, ambient occlusion and specular aliasing handling.
Further ACES upgrades, colour space, HDR handling and tonemappers.
Large level optimisations.
Further shader compilation improvements.
CACAO ambient occlusion.
PhysX Flex and Flow: GPU-accelerated particles across vendors, with AMD compute and NVIDIA CUDA paths.
Tessellated water for ocean rendering, integrated into the RT scene for reflections.
Improved performance for RTAO and RT shadows.
Engine-level multi-threaded tick aggregation for improved instruction coherency.
Core C++ library upgrades and a core engine math upgrade.
Larger ray tracing rendering changes.
Planned
Improved SSGI.
Bespoke Level Editor
Tracking
Resource | Link |
|---|---|
Work plan | |
Backport tracker | |
Sample projects |