Game developers and players alike have long struggled with performance issues in open-world games, particularly those built on powerful but demanding engines. Epic Games is addressing these challenges head-on with its latest technology update aimed at delivering smoother gaming experiences.
Epic Games Launches Unreal Engine 5.6 Preview
Epic Games has released the first preview of Unreal Engine 5.6, introducing significant improvements focused on optimizing performance for open-world games. The preview, now available to developers via the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, and Linux, represents a substantial step forward in the company's ongoing efforts to enhance its widely-used game engine. This release comes at a crucial time when many recent UE5-powered titles have faced criticism for performance issues despite their visual splendor.
Performance Optimization for Open Worlds
The new update specifically targets one of gaming's most persistent challenges: maintaining consistent performance in vast open-world environments. Epic boldly claims that UE5.6 will enable developers to create vast, high-fidelity open worlds with maximum performance and consistent 60Hz frame rates. To help achieve this ambitious goal, the engine now provides device profiles based on Fortnite's optimized settings, offering developers a proven baseline configuration for achieving 60fps across all supported platforms.
Key Improvements in Unreal Engine 5.6:
- Device profiles based on Fortnite's optimized settings for 60fps
- Optimized streaming performance for content loading
- Enhanced Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode
- Parallelization of Renderer Hardware Interface (RHI) API
- Virtual shadow maps optimizations
- GPU Profiler 2.0
- Improved PCG GPU Compute performance
- In-engine MetaHuman Creator
- Expanded animation authoring toolset
Streaming and Ray Tracing Improvements
A key focus of the update is optimized streaming performance when loading content in and out of the game world at runtime. This enhancement directly addresses the stuttering issues that have plagued many Unreal-powered games. Additionally, Lumen-based hardware ray tracing has received substantial optimization, with Epic stating that the hardware ray tracing mode now delivers greater performance on current-generation hardware through low-level optimizations that ensure faster, more efficient rendering while freeing up valuable CPU resources.
Technical Advancements Under the Hood
UE5.6 introduces several technical improvements that contribute to its performance gains. These include parallelization of the Renderer Hardware Interface (RHI) API, optimizations for virtual shadow maps, GPU Profiler 2.0, and improved PCG GPU Compute performance. The update also brings what Epic describes as the biggest and most powerful update yet to the animation authoring tool set, along with the addition of the MetaHuman Creator directly in-engine.
Potential Impact on Current and Future Games
While the update holds promise for future game development, it's important to note that existing games would need to be specifically updated to take advantage of these improvements. Games like Oblivion Remastered, which recently launched using UE5 and has experienced performance issues, would require dedicated updates to benefit from the new optimizations. Epic's own Fortnite is likely to be among the first major titles to implement these improvements, given the company's direct control over both the engine and the game.
Games mentioned using Unreal Engine:
- Oblivion Remastered
- Inzoi
- Avowed
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Fortnite
- Ashes of Creation (MMORPG)
- Satisfactory
Future Roadmap and Limitations
Despite these significant improvements, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has acknowledged that Unreal Engine's fundamental reliance on single-threading remains a limitation. This issue is expected to be addressed more comprehensively in Unreal Engine 6, which is still two to three years away from preview. In the meantime, developers interested in experimenting with UE5.6 are advised to copy rather than convert their existing projects, as the preview build is still considered unstable.
More Details Coming at Unreal Fest
Epic plans to provide more in-depth information about the new features during the State of Unreal keynote at the upcoming Unreal Fest Orlando on June 3. This event will likely offer developers additional insights into how to best leverage the new capabilities of UE5.6 to create better-optimized games with the visual fidelity that Unreal Engine is known for.