Powerful, high-fidelity 60 FPS open worlds
Unreal Engine 5.6 delivers the optimized toolsets you need to build and deliver games that consistently render at 60 FPS on current-generation consoles, high-end PCs, and modern mobile devices.
The Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) system enhancements are designed to deliver even greater performance for Lumen Global Illumination. By eliminating key CPU bottlenecks, you can author more complex scenes while maintaining a smoother 60 FPS frame rate.
In addition, we’ve made significant improvements to the overall Unreal Engine performance when streaming static content in and out at runtime. With the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin (Experimental), you can have a greater amount of immutable static geometry in your worlds that will load faster with constant frame rates. Additionally, all projects will benefit from further improvements over content streaming such as asynchronous physics state creation and destruction.
We’ve also included updated device profiles that are optimized for 60 FPS and tailored for current-generation consoles and desktop platforms. These enable you to meet performance targets, minimize setup, and deliver smoother high-fidelity games to your players.
Accelerated animation authoring
This release brings you the biggest update yet to our in-editor animation toolsets, enabling you to animate with greater speed, precision, and control.
Animations can be edited visually and intuitively with the complete redesign of Motion Trails. Unified for both actors and character controls, you can adjust your arcs and spacing directly in the viewport; choose from styles like Dashed, Time-based, and Heat/Speed mode; and access features that include pinning, offsets, and spaces for even more precision.
Tween Tools have also been revamped to enable you to fine-tune animation on controls or selected keys more quickly. We’ve also added new Hotkeys to control the sliders indirectly, as well as the ability to toggle between different slider types and switch into Overshoot mode. And, with the addition of the new Time Offset slider, you can create and edit with even greater control.
We’ve redesigned the Curve Editor toolbar for speed and performance, making it easier and cleaner for you to manipulate key frames. We’ve streamlined and consolidated icons, and embedded our new Tween tools directly within the curve editor interface to give you quicker access. We’ve also added a new Lattice tool and Smart Key snapping feature for greater control over dense keyframe data.
The latest Sequencer updates enable you to take better control of your timelines. You can navigate complex hierarchies with the new Sequencer Navigation Tool, and sync animation, dialogue, and effects confidently using real-time Audio Scrubbing. We’ve also expanded Sequencer’s ability to scale relatively (Experimental) based on localized audio, enabling sequences to match the timing from different languages.
We’ve also introduced new Experimental solutions to enable more in-editor rigging workflows.
You can now create and sculpt morph targets (Experimental) directly in-editor with the Skeletal Mesh Editor. It leverages Unreal Engine’s built-in modeling tools, enabling you to easily edit pre-existing morph targets and sculpt blend shapes during PIE (Play-in-Editor).
Plus, you can also now bring an unparalleled amount of realism to your digital animations with Control Rig Physics (Experimental) making it easy to add procedural physics motion to character rigs for more dynamic movement. We’ve also added an Experimental new built-in ragdoll physics feature within the rig to create more lifelike responsive animations.
In-engine MetaHuman creation
We’re excited to announce that MetaHuman Creator is now fully embedded within Unreal Engine and includes a slew of additional enhancements, as does MetaHuman Animator.
MetaHuman Creator now offers the ability to create a near infinite range of plausible body shapes, just as you can for faces, while a new Unreal Engine Outfit asset makes it possible to generate complete outfits for MetaHumans that will automatically resize to fit them. And with the significant expansion of MetaHuman’s database of real-world scan data for faces as well as bodies, you can create a more varied range of higher-fidelity characters.
Simplified UX/UI experience
We’ve updated the editor to deliver faster workflows, smarter content organization, and quicker access to the tools and settings you need to stay efficient.
The redesigned Content Browser enhances asset organization and viewing, along with smoother thumbnail resizing and seamless support for both horizontal and vertical orientations.
We’ve redesigned the Viewport Toolbar’s Section Menus and Quick Access Controls for faster access to essential tools. The toolbar now resizes dynamically to show relevant tool options, with dedicated controls for Selection and Modeling modes, and a consistent look across Asset Editors.
Improved developer iteration
You can now accelerate your workflows and deliver content faster across target platforms and devices with developer tools designed for faster iteration.
The Project Launcher UI (Beta) has been completely redesigned for improved usability and efficiency, making it faster to create and manage device launch profiles.
The streamlined interface enables quick selection of the builds, cooking, and device deployment configurations.
Zen Streaming is now Beta; the feature enhances productivity by eliminating the time-consuming steps of full packaged builds and copy/install deployments, streamlining content iteration and testing on your target platform.
You can now also speed up cooking times with Incremental Cook (Experimental), which analyzes asset changes and cooks only updates, helping you iterate faster on target devices.
Faster worldbuilding with procedural tools
We’ve enhanced the PCG framework so you can create worlds and manage complex scenes efficiently, and with better GPU-driven performance.
The Node Graph UX (Beta)has been updated to support inline constant, making it easier for you to create, drag and drop, and manipulate elements. We’ve also introduced a new 3D viewport (Beta) that means you can preview points, textures, and meshes directly in the viewport, and customizable graph templates with node filtering to help streamline your workflow, with faster in-context iteration.
Major improvements to GPU (Beta) performance improvements boost stability, particularly in managing instances within dense, complex scenes. By reducing CPU overhead, the system now enables smoother and more efficient GPU-based spawning at runtime, giving you greater flexibility and precision when working with instancing.
The overall PCG performance (Beta) has also been improved with multithreading support, enabling the system to distribute workloads more efficiently across multiple cores for faster processing, smoother interactions, and a more responsive experience, especially in complex or large-scale environments.
Finally, creating and updating Biomes (Experimental) is now faster and more intuitive with the PCG Biome Core v2 plugin, where new features like per-biome blending and biome layering support give you greater control to build rich, organic environments more efficiently.
Enhanced cinematic & performance capture workflows
A suite of new integrated tools offers better control of your production pipelines, including streamlined performance capture and cinematic rendering.
Mocap Manager (Experimental) is a new end-to-end solution for visualizing, recording, and managing performance capture, all within the Unreal Editor. It helps teams speed up creation by guiding them through asset management, mocap stage setup, performer/character configurations, Live Link data previewing, and more.
We’ve also now integrated Capture Manager (Experimental) with Live Link Hub, offering precise control over ingesting and processing MetaHuman takes from mobile devices, video files, and stereo head mounted cameras (HMCs). You can easily manage and distribute multiple facial performances with third-party facial capture systems across the Unreal Engine and MetaHuman ecosystem.
In cinematics, we’ve released a new pipeline-friendly Cinematic Assembly Toolset (CAT) (Experimental). With everything from swappable project configurations and customizable naming tokens to reusable cinematic templates, the toolset works alongside integrated tools like Take Recorder and Movie Render Queue to help you manage your shot management pipeline from start to finish.
Finally, you can now accelerate your rendering workflows with the new Quick Render (Beta) feature, enabling you to render stills and sequences from viewport and selected cameras to disk with a single click using the settings defined in Movie Render Graph.