Epic Games has made the Unreal Engine 5.6 preview available to developers, accessible through the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, and Linux platforms. The company says this will allow developers to make large, quality open worlds, all while targeting 60 fps. Unreal Engine 5.6 adds new device profiles derived from Fortnite’s optimized settings to assist developers in targeting 60fps on any device. There have also been improvements to streaming performance to address how better address the load and unload of content during the game, which scratches a rather big itch for those using games based on the Unreal Engine.
Epic Games Releases Unreal Engine 5.6 Preview with Enhanced 60fps Performance and Optimized Lumen Ray Tracing
Significant improvements have been made to Lumen hardware ray tracing. According to Epic, the company’s new Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode on Unreal Engine 5.6 should see performance gains on “modern hardware”. These optimizations mean rendering is faster and more efficient, hitting the frame rate budget of the software ray tracing mode and opening up extra CPU headroom, which it arguably needs, given it is clocked in a few hundred MHz lower than the Series X CPU, to maintain more consistent 60fps gameplay.
Such upgrades could benefit titles like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, which heavily taxes the CPU with Lumen ray tracing, though updating that game to Unreal Engine 5.6 would require developer support, which is unlikely given its release status. The preview also includes several other enhancements, such as parallelization of the Renderer Hardware Interface (RHI) API, optimizations for virtual shadow maps, GPU Profiler 2.0, better procedural generation, GPU performance, integration of MetaHuman Creator inside the engine, and the largest expansion yet of the animation authoring tools.
Epic plans to explore these new features further at Unreal Fest Orlando on June 3 during the State of Unreal keynote. Developers can experiment with Unreal Engine 5.6 now but should avoid converting existing projects directly, instead copying them to prevent disruptions, since the preview remains unstable. Despite these improvements, the engine’s dependence on single-threading, acknowledged by Epic founder Tim Sweeney, remains. This core limitation is expected to be addressed in Unreal Engine 6, which won’t appear in preview for another two to three years.
FAQs
How can developers access Unreal Engine 5.6 preview?
It’s available via Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, and Linux.
Does Unreal Engine 5.6 fully fix performance issues?
It improves performance but still relies on single-threading; major fixes come in Unreal Engine 6.
