Epic Games has delivered a significant performance uplift with the recent release of Unreal Engine 5.6. Comparing an open-world tech demo side-by-side on an RTX 5080 in Unreal Engine 5.6 and version 5.4, we can see the framerate improving by up 35% in some scenes, and that's with Hardware Lumen enabled. 

MxBenchmarkPC's video shows that improvements are immediately apparent, particularly in scenarios where the GPU is the limiting factor. Framerates witnessed increases of up to 25%, a direct result of better utilisation of graphics resources, even if this translates to a slightly higher power draw from the card. When the CPU becomes the bottleneck, Unreal Engine 5.6 truly shines, smoothing out frame-time spikes and delivering up to a 35% higher throughput than the older build.

Beyond the raw numbers, the new engine version also brings visual refinements to Lumen, Epic's real-time global illumination and reflection system. Lighting appears more accurate, and reflections are notably sharper, improving the scene's overall visual fidelity.

Unreal Engine 5.6 was officially released earlier this month, shortly after Epic Games concluded its Unreal Fest presentation, where many of these improvements were first teased. The update includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing enhancements that offload a greater portion of the Lumen global illumination workload onto modern GPUs. Furthermore, a new Fast Geometry Streaming plugin aims to make loading vast, static environments feel seamless and stutter-free, tackling a common performance pain point in large open worlds. Additionally, new device profiles have been implemented to automatically adjust settings and help achieve desired frame rates on consoles and high-end PCs.

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KitGuru says: It's nice to see Epic Games improving resource usage on the Unreal Engine 5. However, users will only benefit from these improvements in newer games, as most released games rarely do major engine updates post-release. The Witcher 4 is one such new game confirmed to be using Unreal Engine 5.6 thanks to its improved performance. 

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