Earlier this month, Epic Games released Unreal Engine 5.6. This new version of UE5 promises to offer major performance improvements. So, below you can find a comparison video between the UE5.4 and UE5.6 versions of the Paris Tech Demo.
For those unaware, Unreal Engine 5.6 brings big improvements to how it handles Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT). These changes help make Lumen Global Illumination run faster and smoother. Thanks to these upgrades, the engine removes certain CPU problems that used to slow things down. This means game developers can now create more detailed and complex scenes while still keeping a smooth 60FPS. In simple terms, games can look better and run better at the same time.
Moreover, the team made the engine work better while playing games, especially when loading or removing parts of the game world. They added a new tool, the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin. This helps devs put more objects into the game that don’t change, like buildings or trees. These objects now load faster and help the game keep a smooth frame rate. Also, all games made with Unreal Engine will now stream content more smoothly. This means the game will handle things like physics better, such as when items appear or disappear, so everything feels quicker and runs more smoothly.
Epic Games has also enhanced the PCG framework. As such, devs will now be able to create worlds and manage complex scenes efficiently, and with better GPU-driven performance.
Now, as we can see in the video, Unreal Engine 5.6 can significantly improve performance. In CPU-based scenarios, UE5.6 can be up to 45FPS faster than UE5.4. At the exact same settings, on the exact same PC system. So yes. UE5.6 is the real deal.
Moreover, the frametime graph seems to be smoother with UE5.6. I did not notice some spikes here and there. However, the frametime graph is not a mess as the one we get with UE5.4.
Another thing to note is that the Paris Tech Demo was simply ported to Unreal Engine 5.6 from 5.4. With more work, it could run even faster. So, this is great news for future games that will be using this latest version of UE5.
For what it’s worth, you can download this tech demo and run it yourselves. Sadly, though, this isn’t a free demo. Instead, you’ll have to at least pay a dollar to get access to it.
So, if you are not interested in running it on your PC, you can go ahead and take a look at this video. To capture this footage, MxBenchmarkPC used an Intel Core i7-14700F with 32GB of RAM and an ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 5080. To see the major performance improvements, I suggest focusing on the 720p tests.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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