Epic Games just released Unreal Engine 5.6 for game developers and made an intriguing announcement: It made changes that allow for 60fps with ray tracing in complex open worlds. That’s for current-generation hardware, of course, but Epic expects Unreal Engine 5.6 to be capable of 60fps on consoles, mobile devices, and PCs.
“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 60fps across current-generation hardware,” Epic Games writes. “We’ve also made major strides toward a truly engine-first animation and rigging workflow, reducing the need for DCC round-tripping.”
One of the features to see an improvement is Epic’s Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode. “These low-level optimizations ensure faster, more efficient rendering, bringing high-end visual fidelity and scalability that now matches the frame budget of the software ray tracing mode,” Epic writes in its release notes for Unreal Engine 5.6. “This frees up valuable CPU resources on your target platform and overall helps achieve a more consistent 60Hz frame rate.
The software developer also added and improved features aimed at helping content creators improve animation. These changes affect the animation authoring experience. Epic redesigned its Motion Trails tool to give you more control and made changes to its Tween Tools. Those Tween tools are now also embedded in the Curve Editor, which received its own adjustments to help you manipulate frames more easily.
The Unreal Engine 5.6 update arrives alongside CD Projekt Red’s Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo. The demo played on a PS5 and looks pretty slick, but it doesn’t actually show Witcher 4 gameplay—and as our colleagues at IGN point out, it’s not entirely clear whether the tech demo offers gamers much info to base their sense of the game on.
That demo dropped at the State of Unreal 2025 in Orlando, Florida. Anyone hoping to get a look at Witcher 4 in action was likely disappointed, but the point of the demo was to highlight new technology that will be used in game to create an open world for Ciri, the main protagonist, and her horse, Kelpie, who should be more lifelike than Geralt’s Roach was in previous games. That’s thanks, at least in part, to Unreal Engine 5.6’s ML Deformer feature, which, according to CD Projekt Red, provides a lower-resource-intensive way to portray the deformations that can show muscle flexing, for example.
All of this is enough to make a Witcher fan crazy. The open world shown in the demo looks tantalizing, but it’s tough to get a sense of the actual game without new gameplay footage.
link