All the most important upgrades in Unreal Engine 5.6, as Epic places its focus on performance at State of Unreal
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After a few weeks of being in preview, Unreal Engine 5.6 has been released, adding plenty of features and improvements. Showcased in the State of Unreal, the new tech is already being shown off in upcoming games, such as The Witcher 4 gameplay with ray tracing and smooth framerates, which was even captured on a standard PS5 console.
The release notes for UE 5.6 are rather extensive, but the main selling point is the performance upgrades it’s looking to bring. It looks to provide a stable 60 FPS performance on current-generation hardware. That’s for high-fidelity and large open-scale worlds, as it was showcased with the new Witcher demo, showing off how game releases can be a lot more optimized and playable than some recent releases.
5.6 also adds workflow improvements that should help developers reduce time, as it cuts down on unnecessary additional work, and adds more features to the program itself. Adding quicker access to essential tools, it aims to improve productivity and minimize the time taken.
Unreal Engine 5.6 Mocap Manager
Unreal Engine 5.6 Manipulating Morph Targets
Unreal Engine 5.6 Control Rig Physics
UE 5.6 upgrades
With the primary function being performance, 5.6 promises to give developers optimized toolsets for building and delivering games that consistently run 60 FPS on console, high-end PCs, and mobile devices, with the addition of device profiles, too. That includes enhancing hardware ray tracing, as it eliminates CPU bottlenecks to keep the performance more playable throughout. The performance upgrade extends to the engine as well, with fast geometry streaming plugins.
Animation authoring is getting accelerated, too, as the in-editor animation toolset gets a big update for improved speed, precision, and control, with the motion trails coming directly to the viewport and with immediate effect. There are improvements to the Tween Tools controls and curve director for speed and performance.
Updates to the sequencer provide better timeline control and scaling relativity, as it also adds the ability to sculpt morph targets directly in the editor without needing to import and export models. Those can also get improved control of the rig’s physics for more realistic and dynamic motion.
MetaHuman Creator is now embedded into Untrela Engine, giving you the ability to change bodies and characters on the go with near-infinite shapes. As outputs also cannot automatically resize to fit any type you choose to design, with the database expanding, there is a lot to create and alter.
Animation is getting easier to implement with the ability to capture actors’ performances in real time with any camera and audio, especially as it adds a Mocap Manager for managing performance capture directly in the Unreal Editor.
Graphics cards are getting more utilization in 5.6, too. Reducing the CPU overhead, the enhanced framework allows GPUs to run better and provides more with the implementation of procedural tools to allow for faster worldbuilding.
There’s plenty more to read about if you’re interested, but these highlights just show the kind of impressive features that can enhance games and videos in the upcoming years. Just the Witcher 4 demo shows the impressive feats it can already achieve.
Unreal Engine 5.6 highlights video
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