Epic Video games took to the stage throughout its State of Unreal 2025 occasion to showcase the most recent model of its Unreal Engine. Whereas it is probably not as drastic of model improve as Unreal Engine 5 was in comparison with 4, the brand new model, Unreal Engine 5.6, comes with fairly a couple of new options of its personal. Try the showcase of a few of the new options beneath.
Epic has described one among its key targets with the most recent launch of Unreal Engine as with the ability to keep regular body charges of 60 FPS in open world video games that concentrate on excessive visible constancy. In accordance with the announcement, the engine is now able to reaching this on all fashionable platforms, from PC to consoles, and even smartphones.
“With this launch, one among our key targets was to empower you to construct super-high-fidelity, large-scale open worlds that run easily at 60 FPS throughout current-generation {hardware},” wrote Epic Video games on its official web site. “We’ve additionally made main strides towards a very engine-first animation and rigging workflow, decreasing the necessity for DCC round-tripping. Plus, MetaHumans can now be absolutely authored straight inside the engine, unlocking a extra streamlined and environment friendly artistic course of.”
Among the many options revealed for Unreal Engine 5.6 is {Hardware} Ray Tracing, which permits for higher efficiency when video games make use of Lumen International Illumination. The newest model of the engine is ready to eradicate bottlenecks that may come up from the CPU in the case of rendering large-scale open worlds.
Unreal Engine 5.6 may also make use of the Quick Geometry Streaming Plugin to permit builders to get higher efficiency out of a recreation when static content material is streamed out and in when a recreation is began up. For gamers, this largely implies that there will probably be much less bottlenecks for a recreation to take care of when streaming in static objects that may’t be interacted with, however add to the surroundings.
Animators may also get pleasure from a few of the newer options of the engine, together with a revamp to Tween Instruments that permits animators to have higher management over chosen key frames and nodes. A part of these enhancements can also be the brand new Curve Editor toolbar that additional helps animators with manipulating key frames, together with the addition of the Lattice software and Good Key snapping.
With Unreal Engine 5.6, the MetaHuman Creator may even now be absolutely built-in into the engine’s toolkits. MetaHuman permits builders to create life like trying human characters that may then be utilized in the remainder of Unreal Engine through the improvement of the sport. Builders may also seize actors’ performances in actual time with most webcams and smartphones to then animate within the engine in real-time.
For builders, each skilled and aspiring, that is likely to be questioning, Unreal Engine 5.6 is obtainable proper now. For extra particulars about a few of the new options of Unreal Engine 5.6, together with demonstrations of issues like the brand new {Hardware} Ray Tracing, take a look at the showcase video beneath. Additionally take a look at how The Witcher 4 will make use of a few of these options.