Unreal Engine 5.6 is more than 30% faster than UE5.4 in CPU bound scenarios

winjer

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Unreal Engine 5.6 vs Unreal Engine 5.4 graphics and performance comparison benchmark at 4K, 1440p with Nanite and Hardware Lumen (Ray Tracing) and Ultra settings on RTX 5080 + i7 14700F

This is a huge improvement in one of the areas where Unreal Engine has sucked for a long, long time, CPU thread parallelization.
Now let's hope studios start upgrading their projects to this new version.

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The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
 
The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
If a studio starts a project right now, we aren't going to see anything for like 5-6 years.

Hopefully some projects in flight migrate over but that's going to depend on amount of effort they will have to spend.
 
The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
they wont. only the Expedition 33 devs migrated mid project. Wukong, Silent Hill, Avowed and Stalker devs didnt bother.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.
 
It took them a while but unreal engine has almost unquestionably become the premier high end engine in terms of technology and is now up there in terms of performance aswell. I mean looking at how small indie devs are embarassing Sony first party studios with 1/20th the budget using it its damn impressive.

I mean people like to shit on it for performance but looking at comparable engines it outstrips damn near all in terms of fidelity and physics in 30fps[outside maybe rockstars rage]and in 60fps mode where people like to hate on it for low res almost no other engine uses comparable level of nanite, rt lighting and general fidelity for example compare avatar pandora in performance mode vs good ue5 games. It drops to near 720p aswell and looks less impressive overall and this was before this update. Now it's significantly ahead again looking at w4 tech.

The real fair criticism is stuttering and I hope it gets fixed.
 
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they wont. only the Expedition 33 devs migrated mid project. Wukong, Silent Hill, Avowed and Stalker devs didnt bother.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.

That is true. But it also depends on how much custom code a project has.
Because if there is a lot of custom code to re-write and implement, than it's the same thing as starting over.
 
That is true. But it also depends on how much custom code a project has.
Because if there is a lot of custom code to re-write and implement, than it's the same thing as starting over.
Yep, once you have bunch of other middleware attached and your own code that builds on top, switching over can be very labor intensive.

It really depends on the project, timeline, available resources and support from management.
 
I dont know how game development works but UE5 is kinda ass if it can't just do an in place upgrade, with so many new versions being released every quarter
 
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they wont. only the Expedition 33 devs migrated mid project. Wukong, Silent Hill, Avowed and Stalker devs didnt bother.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.
Didn't Wukong switch from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5 in the middle of development?
 
Its great until you realize that almost no current games will get ported to this new version....


or did I miss reading this somewhere?
 
I dont know how game development works but UE5 is kinda ass if it can't just do an in place upgrade, with so many new versions being released every quarter

You should have stopped here...

Most games have limited budgets and every part of the project is on a roadmap/deadline.

Upgrading to a new version of Unreal involves a lot of QA work to make sure your specific implementations are still working across the board. Doesn't address any plugins you're using or if you aren't really using some of the advanced features of unreal engine 5 anyways, i.e. a lot of static lighting.

The support for UE5.4 and 5.5 are far more mature than 5.6. You're going to upgrade your project that is already behind schedule to 5.6 even when it doesn't use lumen, only for some plugins or code to break to make use of some new features that don't even apply to your game?

Make it make sense.
 
If the best engine for fidelity also get a boost in performance it's the end for the others engines out there.

(I want at least 10 laugh reaction in this post, make me proud, ue5 haters)
 
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Didn't Wukong switch from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5 in the middle of development?
right at the start. they had a trailer for it showing how they migrated to UE5 back in 2021.

they released the game in 2024 on the very first version of UE5. By then UE5.4 was out.

Only to 5.3. So they didnt get any of the UE5.4 cpu improvements which caused a lot of the framerate drops while traversing through the city.

They had 10 months to upgrade to UE5.4.
 
Most devs aren't going to change their engine halfway through the project and definitely not when it is over. Maybe we see games with this in a year or two.

Also I've been hearing how all these .x versions massively improve UE5 for years and somehow UE5 still sucks.
 
they wont. only the Expedition 33 devs migrated mid project. Wukong, Silent Hill, Avowed and Stalker devs didnt bother.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.
it's not that hard if everything goes right. if something goes wrong it's a huge problem on an already tight timeframe.

Of course Epic goes out and says it's super easy because they're trying to sell software.
 
While the performance uplift is great, the improvements to lighting are even better. Wish someone could do an OG Matrix demo comparison with 5.6 just to see how far it has come since the original reveal.

If the best engine for fidelity also get a boos in performance it's the end for the others engines out there.

(I want at least 10 laugh reaction in this post, make me proud, ue5 haters)

I sorta agree with you, but gave you an LOL just to make you proud.
 
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Unreal Engine 5.6 vs Unreal Engine 5.4 graphics and performance comparison benchmark at 4K, 1440p with Nanite and Hardware Lumen (Ray Tracing) and Ultra settings on RTX 5080 + i7 14700F

This is a huge improvement in one of the areas where Unreal Engine has sucked for a long, long time, CPU thread parallelization.
Now let's hope studios start upgrading their projects to this new version.
Cores load is essentially the same between screen, so it's a general optimization and not parallelization optimization
 
they wont. only the Expedition 33 devs migrated mid project. Wukong, Silent Hill, Avowed and Stalker devs didnt bother.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.


Literally all of them except SH2 updated their engines mid development. What are you talking about?
 
The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
Normally to migrate mid-project is almost a nightmare, specially if they don't have the project in the previous version and if the changes aren't minimal in certain things.

It isn't like update a random app. Lots of code that did work will have to be updated, things like art assets, animation or lighting sometimes has to be redone if there are important related changes. Or in case of UE5 as an example some assets, lighting or level design were made considering what Nanite or Lumen covered and what was more optimal stuff for performance or streaming back then, and depending on the version migration they have to change a lot of stuff since the optimal way now is another one.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.
Expedition 33 has over 400 people in the game credits, and this is without having credited the outsourcing teams they must have used.

Programmers aren't the only ones who use the engine. Also the artists, animators, designers, level designers and some people from audio.
 
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Literally all of them except SH2 updated their engines mid development. What are you talking about?
Avowed was literally the first game released on anything other UE5.1 and that was a 2025 game. Every other developer used the same UE5.1 release that was released back in spring 2022.

UE5.4 improved the CPU performance by a massive 50%. It was released in April of last year. Expedition 33 was the first game to ship with it. Avowed is still using a version that was released 2 years ago.

All of those games are CPU bound because UE5 was CPU bound before 5.4. Especially Stalker and Avowed. Wukong, Hellblade 2 and SH2 are not using big open worlds with NPCs so 60 fps was not an issue in those games. Avowed and Stalker literally drop to mid 20s at times because of the CPU load during hub worlds with NPCs. Expedition 33 has no such issue in its hubworlds thanks to a team of 4 programmers who were able to support the artists, level designers while also upgrading the backend to improve cpu performance.

Meanwhile these big AAA studios with hundreds of developers are refusing to upgrade their engines.

The guy I was responding to asked if this new version thats being released in June 2025 would be available in games being released in the near future and i pointed out devs who simply stuck with engine verions 2-3 years old. So no, dont expect 5.6 games to release any time before 2027.
 
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I dont know how game development works but UE5 is kinda ass if it can't just do an in place upgrade, with so many new versions being released every quarter
In theory, there shouldn't be breaking changes from one minor version to the next. In practice: There's always something breaking when you change minor versions. At least in my experience, both at work and in private.
Edit: Ironically, I had more breaking changes moving from Unreal 5 minor versions than I had when I moved a project from Unreal 4.27 to Unreal 5.3.
 
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It took them a while but unreal engine has almost unquestionably become the premier high end engine in terms of technology and is now up there in terms of performance aswell. I mean looking at how small indie devs are embarassing Sony first party studios with 1/20th the budget using it its damn impressive.

I mean people like to shit on it for performance but looking at comparable engines it outstrips damn near all in terms of fidelity and physics in 30fps[outside maybe rockstars rage]and in 60fps mode where people like to hate on it for low res almost no other engine uses comparable level of nanite, rt lighting and general fidelity for example compare avatar pandora in performance mode vs good ue5 games. It drops to near 720p aswell and looks less impressive overall and this was before this update. Now it's significantly ahead again looking at w4 tech.

The real fair criticism is stuttering and I hope it gets fixed.
The stuttering is a PC thing and reality is many devs don't care about PC. It is what it is.

Does it run okay on PS5? Ship it.
 
The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
it will disastrous, they cannot switch midway, unless there is super strong reason behind it
 
Cool. If they truly intend to run TW4 at 60fps with RTGI on PS5 level hardware, they're gonna need the engine to wring out as much juice as it can.
 
The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
Expedition 33 migrated to the newest version months from release.
Going from 5.3 to 5.6 or whatever will be fine. Going from 4 to 5 was a nightmare.
Stuff will break but any studio with staff who's job it is to make the engine work better will have a few months of work to do. Won't affect the art pipeline, lighting, cutscene direction, animation etc.
 
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still runs like ass on PC, it just gets brute forced with more powerful hardware
You have to expect an engine pushing super high fidelity features like nanite and hardware lumen to be heavy. It has a ways to go in optimisation sure, but it's not a heavy engine for no reason.
 
Why don't they just admit the engine is still incomplete garbage that they released too soon. Ut5 titles are just horrible.
Welcome to ongoing product development.
"Product as a service" always like this - there is always room for improvement and, at the same time, new features coveted. So it's always a balance about fixing what's already in and adding what customers wants or will benefit from.
 
You should have stopped here...

Most games have limited budgets and every part of the project is on a roadmap/deadline.

Upgrading to a new version of Unreal involves a lot of QA work to make sure your specific implementations are still working across the board. Doesn't address any plugins you're using or if you aren't really using some of the advanced features of unreal engine 5 anyways, i.e. a lot of static lighting.

The support for UE5.4 and 5.5 are far more mature than 5.6. You're going to upgrade your project that is already behind schedule to 5.6 even when it doesn't use lumen, only for some plugins or code to break to make use of some new features that don't even apply to your game?

Make it make sense.
I disagree. Peish has the right idea, this should have been one of the use cases when Epic creates version upgrades for Unreal Engine:

"As a developer, I would like to seamlessly update to the latest version of Unreal Engine without additional overhead testing current implementation."

If not, something they should strive for. Epic should want their customers to use the latest version effortlessly.
 
Ah yes, move those goalposts
lol what goalposts? You mean me answering literally the question that was posted? Which was just when we might expect devs to utilize these performance upgrades? Right now or in 2-3 years.
The question is, are developers gonna bother migrating mid-project or are we going to start seeing the benefits in 2-3 years when there'll be an even more performant version of the engine out there?
In response to this, i pointed out the last time UE5 got a major CPU upgrade and how no one bothered to upgrade to it aside from a bunch of programmers straight out of college. Expedition 33 for the first few years had just one programmer with any game development experience. He then hired 3 more people straight out of college to help him build the game on the latest version.

If you think Mafia 4, Wuchang, Borderlands 4, Outer Worlds 2, and other 2025 UE5 releases are launching on UE5.6, you havent been paying attention.
 
they wont. only the Expedition 33 devs migrated mid project. Wukong, Silent Hill, Avowed and Stalker devs didnt bother.

Expedition 33 have a total of 4 programmers on their team. it's not that hard. some devs are just lazy.
You are calling devs lazy who didn't switxh to a version of UE that came out of beta many months after their games released? lol
 
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You have to expect an engine pushing super high fidelity features like nanite and hardware lumen to be heavy. It has a ways to go in optimisation sure, but it's not a heavy engine for no reason.

"super high fidelity features like nanite and hardware lumen"

Or even just Lumen

Meh Kinda GIF by Cultura


Not many UE5 games really pushed it and I said WOW, this wasn't possible any other way. Wukong was probably the first one imo.

Even the likes of Silent Hill 2, what is the gain of having strobe-like high refresh Lumen scene updates when almost everything is static?

Its an easy tool for devs to get a graphic quality out fast, but they were not always super high fidelity imo.

Epic is showcasing that it was heavy for no reason, the optimization they talk about now for such core engine tech performances means this engine was pushed out the door way too fucking fast. This gen has basically been a guinea pig test for Epic. Their stutter fixing promises on PC too I won't believe until I see it.
 
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