Leadwerks Game Engine 5.1 is a major update of our game development technology that delivers improved compatibility, faster performance, and new features.
New Deferred Renderer
Although Leadwerks 5.0 launched with a clustered forward+ renderer, after extensive testing we felt the deferred lighting approach we've used since 2008 offers better support for large numbers of lights and decals. 5.1 introduces an all-new MSAA-enabled deferred renderer with stencil-based optimizations and advanced support for transparency.
Improved Terrain
Terrain rendering is improved, with a new clipmap rendering system that eliminates the need for bindless textures. Terrain-mesh blending is implemented as a deferred effect that can be controlled with a simple checkbox with some adjustable settings. A new fluvial erosion tool has been added to help you easily turn simple hills into realistic rugged terrain.
Better Vegetation
To cover your landscapes, the vegetation system now uses alpha-to-coverage. Combined with optimized multi-sample anti-aliasing, this provides clean sharp vegetation without the blurry artifacts temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) and other techniques suffer from. A wind vertex shader effect is also included to make your game environments feel like a living breathing world.
3D Ocean Water
Where the land meets the sea, the new 3D ocean water steps in to improve the realism. Many adjustable settings and buoyancy physics bring your aquatic worlds to life.
Improved Transparency
Transparency is improved, with support for optical density, for thick ice and soft particle edges.
Roughness works with transparency to provide a frosted glass effect:
Reflections of transparent surfaces can be enabled for dramatic real-time reflections. You can use the new sprite animation feature to add reflective fire and other effects, with plenty of free ready-to-use animations available in our downloads system:
Vendor-Agnostic Upscaling
We feel that upscaling should only be used as a last-ditch effort to give new life to old hardware, not as a crutch to replace optimization. Leadwerks 5.1 introduces a new vendor-agnostic upscaling technique that's about 2x faster than FSR1 and runs on all hardware. This can be used to help "potato" PCs play modern games at acceptable framerates.
Khronos Technologies
Leadwerks continues its support for glTF interoperability with added support for the MSFT_texture_dds extension. This enables seamless import and export of models and scenes with DDS compressed textures for applications that support them, alongside with PNG fallbacks.
The world settings dialog features a selection of tone mapping options, including the Khronos PBR neutral tone mapper, ensuring accurate and realistic color rendering through Khronos's standards.
Lower System Requirements
According to the latest Steam hardware survey results, about a third of players are still using ten-year old hardware. Of the ones who have upgraded, more than 60% upgraded to the low-to-midrange hardware, which isn't much faster than yesterday's high-end cards. We want games made with Leadwerks to run fast on everyone's machine. Leadwerks 5.1 provides better support for old and low-end graphics cards, with lower system requirements. 5.1 is fully compatible with Intel integrated graphics, going back to the Haswell architecture (2013). AMD graphics cards are supported going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series (2012), and Nvidia cards going all the way back to the 400 "Fermi" series, released in 2010.
Start Building Your Dreams
These features and enhancements combine to make Leadwerks 5.1 our most developer-friendly game platform to date. Get Leadwerks 5 now and start building your next hit game, or join in one of our fun-and-friendly game tournaments.
