Viz Engine Comparison Matrix
Viz Engine 3 vs. Viz Engine 5
Architected for Today’s Workflows, Ready for Tomorrow’s Demands
Full Support: A standard feature in Viz Engine 5.
Included: A standard feature in Viz Engine 5.
Licensed: An optional, premium feature in Viz Engine 5.
Upgraded: The feature existed in VE3 but is significantly enhanced in VE5.
Not Available: The feature does not exist in Viz Engine 3.
Shader-based Render Pipeline
Viz Engine is the most versatile and powerful real-time 3D graphics rendering and compositing engine. The Viz Engine Renderer serves as the jumping-off point to the next generation of Vizrt innovation.
Viz Engine’s real-time renderer delivers photorealistic graphics and seamless AR/VR experiences, helping broadcasters captivate audiences across any platform. It’s built for speed, enabling rapid rendering with minimal latency – even when working with complex, data-rich visuals. Integrated with industry standards like Unreal Engine and HTML5, Viz Engine ensures creative freedom without compromising on performance. From 2D overlay graphics to immersive storytelling, it’s the rendering power behind the world’s most engaging productions.
Shader Development Environment
Vizrt’s Shader Development Environment gives artists and developers the freedom to create custom looks and visual effects directly inside Viz Engine – no workarounds, no third-party tools.
Creatively, it opens the door to more unique, branded visuals with real-time performance that keeps up with live demands. On the technical side, it’s tightly integrated with the Viz Engine Renderer Pipeline, ensuring shaders run efficiently and predictably in any production setup. Whether you’re building subtle lighting effects or complex visual treatments, it’s a flexible, professional-grade tool that puts full creative control back in your hands.
New Video IO system
Unleash unprecedented power and creative freedom with the completely re-architected Video I/O pipeline in Viz Engine 5. Moving far beyond the architecture of Viz Engine 3, Vizrt’s new Engine intelligently decouples video processing from the main rendering loop using a fully asynchronous model. This crucial change grants the Viz Engine Renderer significantly more time, empowering your team to build more complex, data-rich, and visually stunning graphics without compromise. Simultaneously, the load on the GPU has been reduced dramatically by implementing highly efficient buffering methods, freeing its power for what truly matters: delivering flawless, real-time performance. This modern pipeline also removes the dependency on specific technologies like GPU Direct, offering you greater hardware flexibility and simplifying integration across your entire broadcast infrastructure for a more powerful, stable, and future-proof workflow.
New Font Management & Text
Viz Engine’s new Font Management and Text system gives designers more creative control, better performance, and greater consistency across productions. It streamlines font handling with centralized management, making it easier to apply and update typefaces across all graphics. Advanced text rendering ensures sharper, more legible visuals – especially for dynamic, data-driven content. With support for complex scripts and languages, it also enhances global storytelling with precision and flexibility.
New HDR Pipeline
Visual fidelity is critical, especially in high drama live sports storytelling. Viz Engine 5.4 meets the moment with native HDR scene design in Viz Artist. Now, designers can easily define color spaces at the Scene Tree level, making HDR graphics creation easier and faster than ever. This update ensures that your graphics consistently meet the growing industry standard for HDR video delivery across every device, every time.
New Audio Pipeline
Viz Engine 5 introduces a completely redesigned audio pipeline, powered by the cutting-edge MiniAud.io mixing backend. More than an upgrade – it’s the foundation for a new generation of audio capabilities, delivering cleaner, faster, and more efficient sound processing. With significantly improved audio performance and processing speed, broadcasters can expect richer, more immersive soundscapes that match the visual brilliance of Viz Engine 5. And because this is just the beginning of Vizrt’s audio evolution, it unlocks a roadmap of powerful new audio features to come – ensuring your productions sound as exceptional as they look.
Parallel Outputs
Broadcast is no longer one-size-fits-all. Your audience lives across linear, digital, and OTT platforms—and you need to serve them all without duplicating work. Viz Engine 5.4 answers with Parallel Output support.
You can now assign different output protocols to predefined graphic channels. For example, feed SDI and IP-2110 for your linear broadcasts, while simultaneously powering NDI streams for OTT or social platforms—all from a single workflow.
Parallel Output Support is a smarter, cost-effective way to expand your reach and monetize more platforms, without building parallel infrastructure.
Precision Keyer
Viz Engine’s Precision Keyer delivers ultra-clean keying for both live and recorded content, even in challenging lighting conditions. It produces crisp edges and natural-looking composites. The Precision Keyer supports multiple simultaneous keying layers, making it ideal for virtual sets, AR graphics, and complex studio environments. With real-time performance and sub-pixel accuracy, it ensures seamless integration between talent and virtual elements. Easy to calibrate and highly automated, it streamlines production workflows while maintaining broadcast-quality results.
Flexbox for Adaptive Graphics
Flexbox plugin for Adaptive Graphics brings powerful layout flexibility and automation to on-air graphics design. With Flexbox, designers can create intelligent templates that automatically adapt to varying text lengths, languages, and screen formats – eliminating manual resizing and reducing production errors. It enables dynamic alignment, spacing, and wrapping behaviors, making responsive graphics more efficient and consistent across platforms. Ultimately, this means faster design cycles, less duplicative work, and a more polished viewing experience – whether you’re delivering content to broadcast, digital, or mobile.
Integrated HTML Graphics workflow
Imagine pulling dynamic data or interactive elements straight from any web source into your on-air graphics. Viz Engine 5.4 introduces HTML5 as a Media Asset, unlocking the power of Web graphics within Viz Engine.
Deliver more relevant and engaging content through viewer personalization, create interactive graphics, streamline your workflow, and step into a world of possibilities for data-driven visuals.
VML Clip Player
VML Clip Player is a direct replacement for DirectShow Clip Player and an alternative to Matrox Clip Player.
Viz Engine’s VML Clip Player gives users powerful, real-time video playback capabilities directly within the graphics engine. It supports frame-accurate control, instant scrubbing, and seamless looping – ideal for live production environments where timing is everything. With support for multiple concurrent video streams, users can layer clips, graphics, and live inputs with precision and flexibility. Integrated natively into Viz Engine, the VML Clip Player streamlines workflows by eliminating the need for external playout servers, reducing complexity and latency.
Clip Player Pro with HW Acceleration
Viz Engine’s Clip Player Pro with hardware acceleration makes video playback faster, smoother, and more reliable – especially when dealing with high-res content. By shifting the heavy lifting from the CPU to the GPU, it delivers low-latency performance without compromising quality, even during complex, graphics-heavy productions. Users can run multiple clips at once, scrub with frame accuracy, and trust that everything will play exactly when and how it should.
NDI® WAN workflows
NDI® over WAN in Viz Engine 5 gives production teams the freedom to send and receive high-quality video from anywhere – with no need for satellite trucks or dedicated fiber lines. Whether you’re working across cities or continents, it keeps remote talent, studios, and control rooms connected in real time. That means faster turnarounds, lower costs, and more flexibility to produce from wherever the story is happening.
Up to 8K resolutions over ST-2110
Need to drive massive video walls with multiple ST-2110 outputs? Viz Engine 5.4.0 removes costly interconnecting third-party hardware and replaces it with a direct fibre connection. Where multiple Engines were needed previously, now 4k and up to 8k pixels are possible out of a single Viz Engine.
It’s a breakthrough for users working in control rooms, Esports and Sports arenas, or at large-scale live events. You get better-quality output, with less infrastructure, easier troubleshooting, and lower costs.
8K + resolutions over ST2110
Keep pace with competitors in the ‘bigger is better’ video wall arms race; Serve hi-res graphics to ever-higher-res canvases.
Unreal® Engine Integration
Viz Engine 5’s integration with Unreal® Engine 5 gives creators the best of both worlds – broadcaster-grade control with the cinematic power of real-time photorealism. For designers, it unlocks stunning visuals using Unreal’s advanced lighting, shading, and particle systems, all while staying connected to Vizrt’s template-driven workflows. Technical teams benefit from smooth synchronization between engines, with precise frame accuracy and reliable data exchange that’s built for live production.
Reality Connect™
Reality Connect™, a Viz Engine 5 exclusive, opens a new era of AI-driven 3D talent immersion within a virtual set by making real-time high-fidelity talent reflections and shadow casting possible – natively within Viz Engine and using only a single GPU.
Reality Connect anchors the talent within a virtual set by employing various applications of AI pose estimation, including Vizrt’s own Viz AI.
AI Keyer
Viz Engine 5.4 introduces a new AI Keyer workflow, available via a separate license, that generates a key on the talent. Used in conjunction with Reality Connect™, it supports the insertion of AR graphics behind or in front of the talent – without the use of a green screen, and within indoor and outdoor fixed-camera interviews.
Example use case: Place animated AR graphics behind the Talent during post-match interviews.
GPU Support
From GPU to AI and beyond, Viz Engine 5 maximizes performance and protects your investment by leveraging the latest NVIDIA® technology.
Videoboard Support
Viz Engine 5 maximizes performance and protects your investment by leveraging the latest technology from Matrox®.
Security – CVE updates
Viz Engine 5 maintains a secure and stable production environment against emerging threats.