Epic Games has released the Unreal Engine 5.6 preview to developers, who can download it via the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, and Linux.
The Unreal Engine maker has shared bold claims of enabling vast, high-fidelity open worlds with a target baseline of ‘consistent 60Hz’ (frames per second). To begin with, Unreal Engine 5.6 provides developers with device profiles based on Fortnite’s optimized settings to achieve 60fps on all supported platforms. The streaming performance has also been optimized when streaming content in and out of the world at runtime. Hopefully, this can help alleviate some of the stuttering issues often seen in UE-powered games.
Lumen-based hardware ray tracing has also been optimized, as detailed in this overview provided by Epic:
In Unreal Engine 5.6, Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode delivers even greater performance on current-generation hardware. These low-level optimizations ensure faster, more efficient rendering, bringing high-end visual fidelity and scalability that now matches the frame budget of the software ray tracing mode. This frees up valuable CPU resources on your target platform and overall helps achieve a more consistent 60hz frame rate.
This would be very useful in a game like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, where Lumen hardware ray tracing is very heavy on the CPU. Of course, the game would need to be updated (and tested) in Unreal Engine 5.6, which is unlikely for a released game with no significant post-launch support plan.
There’s a lot more in this preview, like parallelization of the Renderer Hardware Interface (RHI) API, optimizations for virtual shadow maps, GPU Profiler 2.0, improved PCG GPU Compute performance, the addition of the MetaHuman Creator in-engine and what Epic has described as the largest expansion to the engine’s animation authoring toolset yet.
Unreal Fest Orlando is coming up on June 3, and Epic will delve even deeper into the new features during the State of Unreal keynote. Meanwhile, developers are free to install Unreal Engine 5.6 but should be aware that it is still unstable; as such, projects should not be converted but copied from earlier versions to ensure work is not disrupted.
Of course, all the aforementioned improvements won’t change the fundamental issue of Unreal Engine, as it was openly recognized by Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney: its reliance on single-threading. That will change with Unreal Engine 6, which is, however, still two to three years out from a preview.
