I'm excited to announce that after several months of work, the beta of Leadwerks 5.1 is now available on Steam. Version 5.1 is a significant update that brings a wealth of new features, enhancements, and optimizations designed to empower developers and elevate your 3D projects.

What’s New in the 5.1 beta?

Efficient New Deferred Renderer

The clustered forward+ renderer has been replaced with a new deferred renderer, to provide better performance and easier shader development. Many new optimizations have been implemented, such as the use of the stencil buffer for controlling decal visibility. The transparency system in 5.1 is insanely good, with screen-space reflections, probe volumes, refraction, and rough transparency (frosted glass) all integrated into an efficient rendering pipeline that gives you gorgeous visuals with minimal effort.

Support for Potato PCs

Given the inflated costs of PC components today, supporting older hardware is more important than ever. Leadwerks 5.1 introduces optimized support for low-end PCs and older computers, ensuring that even users with modest hardware can enjoy smooth gameplay. In fact, Leadwerks 5.1 will run on computer hardware going all the way back to 2010...including integrated graphics. This change unlocks an underserved market and increases the audience for your game by 50%, while delivering better visuals than ever before.

Terrain-mesh Blending

A new terrain-mesh blending feature lets you seamlessly blend rocks, trees, and other items into the landscape with a natural appearance. This feature makes it easy to achieve stunning outdoors scenery with minimal effort.

Ocean Water

Create breathtaking aquatic environments with the new ocean water system. Realistic waves, reflections, and shoreline effects enable immersive waterfront scenes and coastlines.

Image created by Qulex3

Upscaling

A custom upscaling solution has been added that boosts framerates by as much as 300%, with minimal loss of quality. This allows an Intel HD 630 (definitely potato-class hardware) to achieve a solid 60 FPS in our first-person shooter sample, running at 1080p!

Get the Beta Now

These are just a few of the headlining enhancements set for the final 5.1 release. To access the beta on Steam, right-click on the Leadwerks application in the Steam interface and select the Properties popup menu. In the Game Versions and Betas section you can select the beta branch in the list of available versions to install:

Please see these important instructions for upgrading your existing projects to be compatible with the changes in 5.1.

If you don't have Leadwerks yet, now is a great time to pick it up with a discount on Steam.