Unreal Engine 5.6 promises 60 FPS Ray Tracing on current hardware – features Hardware Ray Tracing enhancements and eliminates CPU bottlenecks

Epic Games just unleashed Unreal Engine 5.6 (UE 5.6), the latest version of its powerful engine designed for game developers and other professionals. According to the company, one of the main targets of this update is to allow current-gen consoles, high-end PCs, and powerful mobile devices to hit 60 fps while using hardware ray tracing. Epic Games achieved this by offloading some tasks from the CPU to the GPU, which allows its Lumen Global Illumination system to achieve higher performance.

Aside from this, it also released an experimental module called Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin. This feature aims to improve open-world loading speeds even as developers add more static objects while still maintaining constant frame rates. There’s also asynchronous physics state creation and destruction, which improves the loading of any asset with any kind of in-game physical interaction without interfering with the main processes necessary to run the game.

The company also said that it has updated the device profiles in UE 5.6, ensuring graphics settings are adjusted automatically for the latest consoles, mobile devices, and PC hardware. All these updates will make it easier for developers to optimize their games and deliver at least 60 fps of gaming performance, even with ray tracing. Epic Games then showed off UE 5.6’s capabilities by previewing The Witcher 4 on PlayStation 5, running out of the box at 60 fps with ray tracing turned on.

Unreal Engine 5.6 packs other improvements for editors, like a complete redesign of the Motion Trails animation tool, improvements on the Curve Editor, Sequencer updates for better timeline control, among others. These major updates make it easier for developers, animators, and other professionals to create using UE5, while also allowing them to make the most of current-generation systems and components. All these system optimizations will allow game titles to make the most out of just-released GPUs and squeeze every bit of performance from them.

At the moment, The Witcher 4 is the only officially announced game title using this game engine. But given Epic Games' unique license for Unreal Engine, it’s almost a given that we will see an abundance of new titles in the coming months that will use it. And with all its optimizations, we hope that these developers will create highly immersive open-world titles that will run smoothly on reasonable hardware.

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