Epic Games to “address a number of core limitations” with Unreal Engine 6
Epic Games promises CPU multi-threading and other core improvements with Unreal Engine 6
On the Lex Fridman Podcast, Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney has started discussing Unreal Engine 6, the company’s next-generation game engine. This engine will succeed Unreal Engine 6, and Epic Games plans to release “preview versions” of the engine in 2-3 years.
While Epic Games is continuing to update and improve Unreal Engine 5, there will come a time when it needs to give its technology a larger overhaul. Unreal Engine 5 updates need to maintain backwards compatibility. With Unreal Engine 6, Epic Games can make larger changes to their engine, delivering “core improvements.”
Currently, Epic Games has two versions of Unreal Engine 5. First, there is their Fortnite version of Unreal Engine 5, then there is the version that is available to game developers. With UE6, the features of both will eventually be merged.
The idea is that the shipping version gains more and more features over time, but maintaining backwards compatibility with old versions and continuing to improve and approach the ultimate version of it as we go,
And we’ve been doing this experiment entirely within the world of Unreal Editor for Fortnite for now. We want to test this and iterate with Fortnite creators in just the metaverse usage case before we make it available to all of our partners using Unreal Engine for all of their projects.
And so the place where all these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6. It’s a few years away, we don’t have an exact time frame, but we could be seeing preview versions of it, perhaps 2 to 3 years from now. And we’re making continuous progress towards it.
The aim for UE6 is to bring the best of both worlds together. Much easier gameplay programming for the Fortnite community, and for licensees, but more scalability to large-scale simulations of all sorts.
Unreal Engine 6 will address Unreal Engine 5’s “core limitations”
With their next-generation game engine, Epic Games wants to “address a number of the core limitations” of their current technology. One example of this is the engine’s single-threaded simulation, which has become a limiting factor for many games. Epic Games plans to embrace multi-threading, allowing games to benefit from CPUs with higher core counts. This should address the CPU issues in many Unreal Engine 5 games, which is great news for gamers and game developers.
Hopefully, these changes will make UE6 more performant. If Epic Games can address these “core limitations”, future games should look better and run faster than today’s UE5 projects. Hopefully, fixes for shader compilation stutters and other issues will also be implemented.
The biggest limitation that’s built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. You, know, if you have a 16 core CPU, we’re using one core for game simulation and running the rest of the complicated game logic because single-thread programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-thread programming. We didn’t want to burden either ourselves, our partners, or the community with the complications of multi-threading.
Over time, that becomes an increasing limitation, so we’re really thinking about and working on the next generation of technology and that being Unreal Engine 6, that’s the generation we’re actually going to go and address a number of the core limitations that have been with us over the history of Unreal Engine and get those on a better foundation that the modern world deserves, given everything that’s been learned in the field of computing in that timeframe.
UE5 has a bad reputation for being overly demanding. It also has a reputation for games that stutter on PC and consoles. If Epic Games can address these issues, UE6 could usher in a new era of stable and stutter-free games. That said, we are unlikely to see games using this engine until at least 2028.
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