Enlighten 3.09, Unreal Engine version 4.22 release

Modern engines like Unreal Engine are now transitioning away from traditional inefficient methods of drawing meshes on the CPU. This addresses a major bottleneck which has long caused headaches for teams who work with massive worlds. Moving mesh drawing closer to the GPU also opens up many exciting options including real-time ray-tracing.

Unreal Engine 4.22 brings a number of exciting major features, such as support for real-time ray-tracing and mesh drawing optimizations. In particular the new Mesh Drawing Pipeline now enables draw call merging. The engine can now automatically identify mesh draw calls that are identical and merge them into a single draw call.

Because Enlighten is deeply integrated within the Unreal Engine renderer we had to carefully re-design some key areas of the implementation. While this was a significant undertaking, it provided an opportunity to revisit and update Enlighten rendering code to take full advantage of recent Unreal Engine renderer improvements. Enlighten for UE4 now fully supports the new mesh drawing pipeline to enable efficient draw call merging in combination with Enlighten indirect lighting.

These changes also lay the groundwork for use of Enlighten in combination with real-time ray-tracing in Unreal Engine. The changes to support draw call merging are a key building block for making Enlighten lighting data available to ray-tracing shaders. This brings us a step closer to our vision for the combination of high accuracy real-time ray-traced effects with Enlighten global illumination. We will be presenting more about this combination in the future as our research progresses.

The Enlighten team

For release notes please see the UE4 user documentation