Unreal Engine 5.6 has been benchmarked, revealing up to an impressive 30% performance gain while boosting graphics fidelity over Unreal Engine 5.4, perhaps finally addressing many of the engine's infamous stuttering issues. MxBenchmarkPC on YouTube showcased an Unreal Engine Paris tech demo running on an RTX 5080 and Core i7-14700F, comparing the 5.6 and 5.4 versions of the engine against each other at 1440p and 4K resolutions.
The YouTuber provided five runs featuring direct comparisons between engine versions, with several standalone runs mixed in. The first two runs involved moving benchmarks featuring a walk around the streets of Paris. The first run was benchmarked at 1440p, while the second was run at 720p to demonstrate a CPU-limited scenario.
In the first run, Unreal Engine 5.6 was 22% faster compared to version 5.4; additionally, CPU usage dropped by around 17% on average across all 16 threads (of the 14700F's 8 P-cores) with version 5.6. The 720p run showed even greater gains for Unreal Engine 5.6, which outperformed version 5.4 by a whopping 30%. The last three runs (with direct comparisons of 5.6 vs. 5.4) involved static shots of different areas of the city. These three runs were anywhere between 15% to 22% faster on Unreal Engine 5.6 compared to version 5.4.
The Paris demo also showcased improved environmental and object lighting in most scenes. Interior scenes are particularly darker with chairs and tables gaining extra shadowing in 5.6 over 5.4. The improved lighting fidelity gives the demo a more photorealistic look in version 5.6, while version 5.4 lighting looks more "gamified" by contrast.
Version 5.6's massive improvement in performance can be attributed to several updates the devs made to the engine. Including offloading more tasks from the CPU to the GPU for workloads related to its Lumen global illumination system, and the introduction of the Fast Genometry plugin that improves open-world loading speeds. Unreal Engine 5.6 is primarily a performance-focused patch targeting 60 FPS with hardware ray tracing on the latest consoles, high-end PCs, and powerful mobile devices.
We have yet to see any games (beyond Fortnite, allegedly) taking advantage of Unreal Engine 5.6. But this new update provides the best opportunity yet for the engine to rid itself of its infamous stuttering issues plaguing many Unreal Engine 5 titles.
