Your GPU’s Worst Nightmare Is Here, Epic Games Reveals Unreal Engine 6 Roadmap

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Your GPU’s Worst Nightmare Is Here, Epic Games Reveals Unreal Engine 6 Roadmap

Epic Games has finally started giving us new information about Unreal Engine 6 (UE6) and what’s next for its industry-defining technology. According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, UE6 will be a convergence point for every branch of Epic’s ecosystem.

While we don’t know any solid details as of yet, Sweeney laid out what the plans were and what the company is aiming to do with UE6. The gaming industry has turned on Unreal Engine 5 a good bit because of all the performance issues that it has, and if there’s one thing we want from UE6, it’s fewer bugs.

Do we really need Unreal Engine 6 when Unreal Engine 5 is already bad enough?

During a recent appearance on the

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, Tim Sweeney described Unreal Engine 6 as the culmination of years of parallel development between Unreal Engine 5 and Fortnite’s Unreal Editor for Fortnite (EUFN). According to him, UE6 is being designed for easier gameplay programming, scalability for large-scale simulations, and greater ease of use.

The aim for UE6 is to bring the best of both worlds together… Much easier gameplay programming for the Fortnite community and for licensees, but more scalability to large-scale simulations of all sorts, greater use of use, meaning it will be easier to hire programmers who are familiar with and experienced with the thing. But also ensure that every game developer has the full deployment capabilities. So they can build a game once and then ship it anywhere.

This might be some good news for most developers, a relief, even maybe. Despite all the advanced technology, like Lumen and Nanite, that Unreal Engine 5 brings, it has had its share of issues over the last few years. We’ve seen consistent criticism over the performance of games made in Unreal Engine 5, and it seems like Unreal Engine 6 might address this head-on.

One of the major new focuses for UE6 is something developers have wanted for a long time, and that is multithreaded support. Until now, Unreal has largely leaned on single-threaded game simulation, and this has made it so that the best CPUs of the last two generations have been severely underutilized.

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Tim Sweeney says that the company “didn’t want to burden either ourselves, our partners, or the community with the complications of multi-threading.” But it seems like that has changed. So UE6 won’t just be a mix of two previously existing things; it will also prioritize modern computing standards.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come out anytime soon for the sake of our PCs

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While no exact timeline has been confirmed, Sweeney estimates that UE6 preview builds could arrive within the next two to three years. If we looked at the last version of Unreal Engine, UE5 was revealed in 2020, but games using it didn’t fully come out until way later. So it’s safe to assume that we may not see fully-fledged UE6 titles until 2029 or later.

In the meantime, Epic plans to continue refining Unreal Engine 5 while testing UE6 features internally through Fortnite. The company is testing many of UE6’s experimental features exclusively within Fortnite’s ecosystem first, using it as a proving ground before rolling them out fully.

We’re all waiting to see if things get better or worse with Unreal Engine 6, but one thing is clear. Unreal Engine 6 is going to be very ambitious. We don’t know when or how it will come out, but from what we’re hearing, it sounds like a project so ambitious it may finally live up to the overused phrase “next-gen.”