Unreal Engine 5.6 outperforms 5.4 with up to 30% faster frame rates and improved lighting

Bottom line: Epic’s latest version of Unreal Engine is making waves with substantial performance improvements and visual enhancements that address long-standing engine issues. Direct comparisons against Unreal Engine 5.4 show at least a 30-percent increase in performance, especially in CPU-limited scenarios.

The findings come from tests by the YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC (above), which put the Paris tech demo by Scans Factory (below) through its paces. Running on a system equipped with an RTX 5080 GPU and a Core i7-14700F CPU at multiple resolutions, the demo provided direct, side-by-side comparisons between versions 5.4 and 5.6.

In GPU-limited scenarios at 1440p and 4K, Unreal Engine 5.6 delivered roughly 22 percent higher frame rates than version 5.4. The gains were even more pronounced in CPU-limited runs at 720p, where frame rates jumped by as much as 30 percent. Tom’s also reported a 17 percent drop in average CPU usage across all 16 threads of the Core i7-14700F, pointing to meaningful optimizations in the engine’s rendering pipeline.

Version 5.6 brings noticeable visual improvements. MxBenchmarkPC observed more refined lighting and reflections under Lumen global illumination, while Tom’s highlighted darker interior spaces with added shadowing that made the scene feel more grounded and realistic. By comparison, version 5.4 appeared flatter and more “gamified,” especially indoors.

Epic Games teased these upgrades earlier this month at its Unreal Fest keynote, crediting better hardware-accelerated ray tracing and a new Fast Geometry Streaming plugin that speeds up rendering in expansive worlds. These features shift much of the lighting and asset streaming work onto modern GPUs, improving visual fidelity and smoothing out the frame-time spikes that have often caused stuttering. This optimization is especially significant for games leveraging Unreal Engine’s Lumen global illumination system. By offloading more work to the GPU and reducing CPU bottlenecks, Unreal Engine 5.6 is better equipped to hit 60 FPS targets on modern consoles and high-end PCs.

While Epic Games upgraded Fortnite to Unreal Engine 5.6 earlier this month, no other major commercial games have implemented it yet. However, the updated engine shows substantial promise. The company showcased a Witcher IV tech demo running at a stable 60 FPS with full ray tracing enabled on the PlayStation 5 – a notable milestone for real-time rendering on current-gen hardware.

With version 5.6 now publicly available, developers can begin incorporating these optimizations into their projects. Whether this version finally rids Unreal Engine of its infamous stuttering issues remains to be seen, but the numbers – and the visuals – are promising.