Unreal Engine 5.2 introduced a new system for preloading Pipeline State Objects (PSOs) to help reduce stuttering caused by shader compilation in games.

Unreal Engine 5.4: Epic's latest revision delivers big performance and feature wins Yet frame-time stability, traversal stutter and shader precompilation still need improvement.

Epic announced a slate of new features for Unreal Engine 5 during its State of Unreal address, but the most important update flew under the radar.

Unreal's shader support was completely overhauled. The engine works with thousands of shaders, with between five and 20 of them being used for just one material.