Because Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t fully utilize the threads and cores of our processor, we may experience some unusual stuttering.

Tim Sweeney, CEO and majority shareholder of Epic Games, has spoken for the first time about Unreal Engine 6 in the latest episode of the Lex Fridman podcast (see embed below). He explained that the next major version of the engine will unify the parallel development branches currently underway at Epic. The goal is to deliver a preview version to developers within two to three years.

“We have these two different strands of progress. There’s Unreal Engine 5 for game developers, and there’s Unreal Engine 5 for the Fortnite community. Some development features are exclusive to one side and haven’t been made universal. Not all UE5 functions are in Fortnite yet because we either haven’t finalized them or can’t yet deploy them platform-agnostically across all seven platforms. Unreal Engine 6 is where these paths converge. That will still take a few years. We don’t have an exact timeline, but maybe in two to three years we’ll see a preview. We’re steadily working toward it,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney admitted the technology is currently limited by Epic’s decision to rely on single-threaded simulations. While this simplifies development for Epic and its partners, the plan is to eliminate this bottleneck with a fully multithreaded Unreal Engine 6, which could finally solve the stuttering seen in many games.

“The biggest limitation that has emerged over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run the simulation on a single thread. If you have a 16-core CPU, only one is used for simulation. The rest handle complex logic, because single-threaded programming is vastly simpler than multithreaded programming. We didn’t want to burden ourselves or our partners or the community with the added complexity. But over time, this has become more of a constraint. That’s why we’re now working on the next generation of technology—Unreal Engine 6—where we’ll address these long-standing limitations and modernize the foundation, given all we’ve learned in computing over the years,” he added.

This could explain CPU issues in many Unreal Engine 5 and even UE4 titles. Epic is finally addressing it—but remember, it usually takes 1–1.5 years from preview to the first wave of games (UE5 was previewed in early 2022, with the first games arriving mid-2023). That means we shouldn’t expect UE6 titles before 2028 or 2029.

Source: WCCFTech