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

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Better optimization can lead to more FPS for next-gen games on the same hardware.

Unreal Engine 5.6 cover image
(Image credit: Epic Games)

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.

Unreal Engine 5.6 Feature Highlights - YouTube Unreal Engine 5.6 Feature Highlights - YouTube
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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.

The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo 4K | State of Unreal | Unreal Fest Orlando - YouTube The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo 4K | State of Unreal | Unreal Fest Orlando - YouTube
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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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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • thesyndrome
    This is a pleasant surprise, UE5 has been receiving a lot of valid complaints about it's performance in relation to the visual fidelity it delivers, especially in relation to stuttering, but I thought Epic would just brush these complaints off and blame the consumers for not having the latest tech, so it's nice to see they are taking these criticisms seriously and trying to rectify them, but I'll wait till it's in our hands before I claim they've done well, because UE has a history of breaking 1 thing to fix another, such as the texture streaming problems with UE3 that they implemented to improve performance, but resulted in textures visibly "popping in" or sometimes never fully loading at all.
    Reply
  • edzieba
    "60 FPS Ray Tracing on current hardware " is a fairly meaningless statement without a specific performance target. One could trace rays at 60FPS on a Raspberry Pi, just not many of them per frame.
    Reply
  • Roland Of Gilead
    Yeah, this is one I won't hold my breath on.
    Reply
  • Lucky_SLS
    Yup, will believe it when I see some benchmarks!
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    is to allow current-gen consoles, high-end PCs, and powerful mobile devices to hit 60 fps while using hardware ray tracing.

    a high end PC should NOT only be aiming for 60 fps :|

    any engine that focuses on that is an engine that needs removed.
    Reply
  • valthuer
    Admin said:
    Better optimization can lead to more FPS for next-gen games on the same hardware.

    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.

    OK, first of all: high-end PCs represent a rather small part of the market. What about the rest of the PC gamers?

    Second:

    If Unreal Engine 5.6 does indeed have the potential for better performance (and, if UE5 is any indication of things to come, that's highly questionable), how many of the current generation of developers will seriously devote time in optimizing their games?

    Not many, if i had to guess.

    The vast majority of them, will keep relying on the existence of the all-time-favourite combo of DLSS+FG and the gamers will pay the price.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Whenever I see this company Epic Games I just roll my eyes.
    Reply
  • Mr Majestyk
    But 5.7 will be much better and then of course we should really wait for UE6 or actually UE6.2 as it takes a few updates to sort all the new problems.
    Reply