Unreal Engine 5.6 Boosts Performance by Up to 35% Over Version 5.4

The new version of Epic Games’ graphics engine, Unreal Engine 5.6, comes with significant performance optimizations, as shown by a comparison of the Paris Tech Demo from Scans Factory. A video from the MxBenchmarkPC channel shows the demo running on an RTX 5080 graphics card, comparing Unreal Engine versions 5.6 and 5.4 with hardware-enabled Lumen technology. The results reveal notable improvements in resource management.

In scenarios where the GPU is the limiting factor, the update offers up to a 25% increase in frame rate. This improvement is due to a more efficient use of graphic resources, although it implies a slight increase in energy consumption to achieve the boost. When the processor becomes the bottleneck, Unreal Engine 5.6 achieves up to 35% higher performance compared to the previous version, as well as smoothing out spikes in frame time.

Beyond the numbers, the new version also fine-tunes Lumen’s visual effects. For example, lighting is more accurate and reflections are seen more sharply, maintaining the same level of detail in shadows and ambient occlusion. The official release of Unreal Engine 5.6 came after Epic Games’ Unreal Fest event. New features include improvements to hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which now shifts a greater workload from Lumen global illumination to modern GPUs.

Other new features include a plugin called “Fast Geometry Streaming,” which makes it easier to smoothly load large static worlds, and a redesigned motion trail interface for animators. To demonstrate its potential, Epic collaborated with CD Projekt Red on a technical demo of The Witcher IV running at 60 FPS with ray tracing enabled on a PlayStation 5.