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Backside line: Epic’s newest model of Unreal Engine is making waves with substantial efficiency enhancements and visible enhancements that tackle long-standing engine points. Direct comparisons in opposition to Unreal Engine 5.4 present a minimum of a 30-percent enhance in efficiency, particularly in CPU-limited eventualities.
The findings come from exams by the YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC (above), which put the Paris tech demo by Scans Manufacturing unit (beneath) by means of its paces. Operating on a system geared up with an RTX 5080 GPU and a Core i7-14700F CPU at a number of resolutions, the demo supplied direct, side-by-side comparisons between variations 5.4 and 5.6.
In GPU-limited eventualities at 1440p and 4K, Unreal Engine 5.6 delivered roughly 22 % larger body charges than model 5.4. The positive factors have been much more pronounced in CPU-limited runs at 720p, the place body charges jumped by as a lot as 30 %. Tom’s additionally reported a 17 % drop in common CPU utilization throughout all 16 threads of the Core i7-14700F, pointing to significant optimizations within the engine’s rendering pipeline.
Model 5.6 brings noticeable visible enhancements. MxBenchmarkPC observed extra refined lighting and reflections underneath Lumen international illumination, whereas Tom’s highlighted darker inside areas with added shadowing that made the scene really feel extra grounded and real looking. By comparability, model 5.4 appeared flatter and extra “gamified,” particularly indoors.
Epic Video games teased these upgrades earlier this month at its Unreal Fest keynote, crediting higher hardware-accelerated ray tracing and a brand new Quick Geometry Streaming plugin that hurries up rendering in expansive worlds. These options shift a lot of the lighting and asset streaming work onto trendy GPUs, enhancing visible constancy and smoothing out the frame-time spikes which have typically brought about stuttering. This optimization is particularly important for video games leveraging Unreal Engine’s Lumen international illumination system. By offloading extra work to the GPU and decreasing CPU bottlenecks, Unreal Engine 5.6 is best geared up to hit 60 FPS targets on trendy consoles and high-end PCs.
Whereas Epic Video games upgraded Fortnite to Unreal Engine 5.6 earlier this month, no different main industrial video games have applied it but. Nonetheless, the up to date engine reveals substantial promise. The corporate showcased a Witcher IV tech demo working at a steady 60 FPS with full ray tracing enabled on the PlayStation 5 – a notable milestone for real-time rendering on current-gen {hardware}.
With model 5.6 now publicly obtainable, builders can start incorporating these optimizations into their tasks. Whether or not this model lastly rids Unreal Engine of its notorious stuttering points stays to be seen, however the numbers – and the visuals – are promising.
