Epic Games took to the stage during its State of Unreal 2025 event to showcase the newest version of its Unreal Engine. While it may not be as drastic of version upgrade as Unreal Engine 5 was compared to 4, the new version, Unreal Engine 5.6, comes with quite a few new features of its own. Check out the showcase of some of the new features below.
Epic has described one of its key goals with the latest release of Unreal Engine as being able to maintain steady frame rates of 60 FPS in open world games that focus on high visual fidelity. According to the announcement, the engine is now capable of achieving this on all modern platforms, from PC to consoles, and even smartphones.
“With this release, one of our key goals was to empower you to build super-high-fidelity, large-scale open worlds that run smoothly at 60 FPS across current-generation hardware,” wrote Epic Games on its official website. “We’ve also made major strides toward a truly engine-first animation and rigging workflow, reducing the need for DCC round-tripping. Plus, MetaHumans can now be fully authored directly within the engine, unlocking a more streamlined and efficient creative process.”
Among the features revealed for Unreal Engine 5.6 is Hardware Ray Tracing, which allows for better performance when games make use of Lumen Global Illumination. The latest version of the engine is able to eliminate bottlenecks that might arise from the CPU when it comes to rendering large-scale open worlds.
Unreal Engine 5.6 can also make use of the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin to allow developers to get better performance out of a game when static content is streamed in and out when a game is started up. For players, this largely means that there will be less bottlenecks for a game to deal with when streaming in static objects that can’t be interacted with, but add to the scenery.
Animators can also enjoy some of the newer features of the engine, including a revamp to Tween Tools that allows animators to have greater control over selected key frames and nodes. Part of these enhancements is also the new Curve Editor toolbar that further helps animators with manipulating key frames, along with the addition of the Lattice tool and Smart Key snapping.
With Unreal Engine 5.6, the MetaHuman Creator will also now be fully integrated into the engine’s toolkits. MetaHuman allows developers to create realistic looking human characters that can then be used in the rest of Unreal Engine during the development of the game. Developers can also capture actors’ performances in real time with most webcams and smartphones to then animate in the engine in real-time.
For developers, both professional and aspiring, that might be wondering, Unreal Engine 5.6 is available right now. For more details about some of the new features of Unreal Engine 5.6, including demonstrations of things like the new Hardware Ray Tracing, check out the showcase video below. Also check out how The Witcher 4 will make use of some of these features.
