Unreal Engine 5.6 fixes critical performance issues

Unreal Engine 5.6 makes 60 FPS gaming a lot more feasible

Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 5.6, and its release should come as good news for both gamers and developers alike. With this new version of Unreal Engine 5 comes a new suite of hardware optimisations. These optimisations allow developers to get more out of today’s hardware.

Thanks to this new version of Unreal Engine 5, running large open-world games at 60FPS has become a lot easier. This is why CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 4 tech demo can run at 60 FPS on PlayStation 5 with ray tracing. Without this update, The Witcher 4 would likely run at 30 FPS.

Powerful, high-fidelity 60 FPS open worlds

Unreal Engine 5.6 delivers the optimized toolsets you need to build and deliver games that consistently render at 60 FPS on current-generation consoles, high-end PCs, and modern mobile devices.

Render Parallelisation with Unreal Engine 5.6

The latest version of Unreal Engine comes with RHI render parallelisation, which allows games to utilise the multi-threaded nature of modern CPUs better. By refactoring the engine’s Render Hardware Interface (RHI), render thread performance is increased. Simply put, fewer operations are restricted to a single thread.

By freeing up resources on the engine’s primary render thread, it is now easier for games to target higher framerates on today’s PCs and consoles.

Hardware Ray Tracing Optimisations

Unreal Engine’s Hardware Lumen ray tracing mode has been optimised to improve its performance on current-generation hardware. Thanks to low-level optimisations and increased rendering efficiency, high-end hardware lumen image quality can now be achieved in the frametimes of software Lumen ray tracing modes. Additionally, ray tracing has been optimised to free up valuable CPU resources. Yes, Unreal Engine’s Lumen tech has been optimised to improve both CPU and GPU performance.

The Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) system enhancements are designed to deliver even greater performance for Lumen Global Illumination. By eliminating key CPU bottlenecks, you can author more complex scenes while maintaining a smoother 60 FPS frame rate.

Goodbye traversal stutter?

One of the biggest problems that plagues Unreal Engine 5 is traversal stutter. Many UE5 games stutter when moving across large worlds. With version 5.6, an experimental “Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin” has been added to help enable faster loading and more consistent frametimes. Sadly, due to the experimental nature of this feature, it will be a while before it can be integrated into shipping UE5 projects.

In addition, we’ve made significant improvements to the overall Unreal Engine performance when streaming static content in and out at runtime. With the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin (Experimental), you can have a greater amount of immutable static geometry in your worlds that will load faster with constant frame rates. Additionally, all projects will benefit from further improvements over content streaming such as asynchronous physics state creation and destruction.

We’ve also included updated device profiles that are optimized for 60 FPS and tailored for current-generation consoles and desktop platforms. These enable you to meet performance targets, minimize setup, and deliver smoother high-fidelity games to your players.

If there is one thing that gamers and developers are crying out for, it’s increased hardware efficiency. UE 5.6 allows developers to get more from today’s hardware. These changes will allow some games to target higher framerates. Other projects will be able to use this freed-up performance to push graphical fidelity up a notch.

While we would like to see full fixes for issues like shader compilation and traversal stutters, it cannot be denied that UE 5.6 delivers some major improvements. Undeniably, Lumen and Render Thread efficiency improvements are high on the list of improvements that developers want. Furthermore, a design goal of enabling more 60 FPS games should be applauded.

If there’s one thing to be said about Unreal Engine 5, it’s that its feature set is arguably too ambitious for current-generation hardware. Even so, its optimisations with each new release have made its cutting-edge visual features increasingly accessible to developers. Sadly, it will take years for new games to ship with Unreal Engine 5.6. Regardless, it’s good to see Epic Games’ engine tech progress. In time, all gamers will see the fruits of these efforts.

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