First Unreal Engine 6 Info Shared by Epic’s Tim Sweeney

Epic Games president and largest shareholder Tim Sweeney discussed Unreal Engine 6 for the first time (alongside several other topics) in a massive interview featured in the latest episode of the Lex Friedman podcast.

Sweeney said that the next big iteration of the Unreal Engine technology will unify the parallel development threads that Epic is currently working on. The goal is to get the first UE6 previews out to developers in two to three years.

We have these two different tendrils of progress. There’s Unreal Engine 5 for game developers, and there’s Unreal Engine 5 targeting the Fortnite community. And there’s different bits of development that are only in one area that aren’t applied to both. Not all the Unreal Engine 5 features are actually available in Fortnite, because some of them we haven’t figured out or haven’t gotten to the point where we can deploy them to all seven platforms in a platform-independent way.

The place where all of these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6.  And it’s a few years away. We don’t have an exact timeframe, but we could be seeing preview versions of it perhaps two to three years from now. We’re making continuous progress towards it.

Elsewhere in the interview, the Epic president admits that the technology is currently being hindered by the company’s decision to stick with single-threaded simulations. That choice was made to simplify things not only for Epic itself but also for all game developers, but it is a limitation that Sweeney plans to overcome with Unreal Engine 6, which should finally fully embrace multithreading.

The biggest limitation that’s built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation on Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we’re using one core for game simulation and running the rest of the complicated game logic because single-thread programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-thread programming, and we didn’t want to
burden either ourselves, our partners, or the community with the complications of multi-threading.

Over time, that becomes an increasing limitation, so we’re really thinking about and working on the next generation of technology and that being Unreal Engine 6, that’s the generation we’re actually going to go and address a number of the core limitations that have been with us over the history of Unreal Engine and get those on a better foundation that the modern world deserves, given everything that’s been learned in the field of computing in that timeframe.

This is undoubtedly the source of most, if not all, the CPU-related issues we’ve seen with Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games. It’s great to hear Epic is finally going to address it, though it’ll be a long while before we see Unreal Engine 6 in any game. As a reminder, the first UE5 preview dropped in early 2022, while the first games that took advantage of the new technology didn’t appear on the market until mid-to-late 2023: the Layers of Fear remake, Remnant II, Immortals of Aveum, and Lords of the Fallen, to name a few. As such, we might have to wait until late 2028/2029 to play the initial batch of Unreal Engine 6 games.