Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney Teases Unreal Engine 6 Details
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney dropped the first official teasers about Unreal Engine 6 in a wide-ranging interview on the Lex Friedman podcast. While it's still years down the road, Sweeney shared some exciting insights into what the next version of the monster engine will hold.
Bringing It All Together: The Goal for UE6
What's the big idea with UE6 then. According to Sweeney, Epic now has two primary development branches on Unreal Engine 5: one for conventional game developers and the other specifically customized for the ginormous Fortnite universe. Those two spaces are not all going to be interconvertible quite as easily.
Unreal Engine 6 aims to be that where those different streams meet. The idea is having an integrated engine where innovation flows back to everyone, so features work the same way across all platforms Epic supports. Visualize bringing the family together again under one roof.
When Will We See It
Don't hold out for tomorrow on a release. Sweeney mentioned that we can anticipate the appearance of developer preview versions to begin within a couple of years from now. It is a long way, but the wheels are definitely in motion.
The Big Change: Finally Embracing Multithreading
Perhaps most significant is that Unreal Engine 6 will remove an age-old limitation: its single-threaded game simulation. Sweeney admitted that in the past it was simpler to have the core logic of the game run on a single CPU core and that it made life much simpler for both Epic and engine developers.
But with contemporary CPUs having many cores, holding onto one core is a huge bottleneck. Ever noticed why certain UE4 and UE5 games can occasionally have trouble with CPU performance even on powerful hardware. This single-threaded method is probably a significant contributing factor.
Unreal Engine 6 will do that in a different way, fundamentally. Epic plans to re-architect it to utilize multiple CPU cores better for game simulation. A massive undertaking, but it sets the stage for a much more solid foundation for future games to take advantage of the hardware we have now.
Patience is Key for UE6 Games
While it is wonderful news to hear that Epic is addressing this basic limitation, we have to wait. Remember Unreal Engine 5. Announcements started arriving in early 2022, but the first set of games actually making use of its abilities didn't really come along until mid-to-late 2023.
Following that pattern, even when UE6 is announcing landings in 2-3 years' time, we probably won't be playing the first batch of fully featured Unreal Engine 6 games until towards the end of 2028 or even 2029. However, it's wonderful to know that a giant leap forward is being charted.
