Unreal Fest 2025 is in full swing. Epic Video games isn’t solely giving a glimpse of the graphical splendor of The Witcher 4, but additionally letting Unreal Engine 5.6 off the leash.
Unreal Fest 2025 kicked off right now in Orlando. Naturally, the builders at Epic Video games had been targeted on the brand new options of Unreal Engine and The Witcher 4, which had already been introduced forward of the festivities.
The Witcher 4: A technical demo in Unreal Engine 5.6
Absolutely the spotlight of the State of Unreal keynote was undoubtedly the demonstration of The Witcher 4
Not like earlier bulletins with pre-rendered trailers, CD Projekt Crimson and Epic Video games introduced scenes from the present state of growth of the sport.
Nevertheless, it needs to be famous that the pictures proven are a technical presentation within the context of Unreal Engine 5.6 and never precise gameplay, as CD Projekt Crimson explains within the accompanying announcement.
The tech demo took gamers to the beforehand unknown area of Kovir, the place protagonist Ciri travels by snow-covered mountain landscapes and dense forests together with her horse Kelpie.
Unreal Engine 5.6: Concentrate on efficiency and open-world growth
Alongside the Witcher demo, Epic Video games introduced the speedy availability of Unreal Engine 5.6. Based on the announcement, the brand new model focuses on optimizing open-world video games and attaining constant 60 FPS efficiency on present console {hardware}.
Lumen optimizations
One of the vital vital enhancements issues the lumen system for international illumination:
Based on Epic Video games, the hardware-based ray tracing implementation has been essentially redesigned to remove CPU bottlenecks.
The optimizations are meant to deliver the {hardware} ray tracing variant of Lumen as much as the efficiency degree of the software-based answer, releasing up corresponding CPU assets for different techniques.
“Quick Geometry Streaming Plugin”
One other key function of Unreal Engine 5.6 is the (nonetheless experimental) “Quick Geometry Streaming Plugin.”
Based on the builders, this technique permits giant quantities of static geometry to be loaded sooner and with extra constant body charges at runtime.
For open-world video games, Epic Video games guarantees smoother transitions between totally different areas with out annoying loading instances or body charge drops.
Renderer parallelization and extra
The Render {Hardware} Interface (RHI) has been extensively reworked to raised make the most of the multithreading capabilities of recent {hardware}. Beforehand, sure rendering operations had been restricted to the render thread, despite the fact that present graphics APIs resembling DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Metallic help parallel processing. These limitations have been eliminated in model 5.6, as Epic Video games explains within the launch notes
“MetaHuman Creator,” Epic’s instrument for creating photorealistic digital people, has additionally obtained recent updates. The system is now straight built-in into the Unreal Editor and gives new parametric physique techniques and improved visible high quality.
MetaHuman is utilized in The Witcher 4 to render NPCs, giving even minor characters a excessive diploma of realism.
The brand new MetaHuman Animator, however, permits real-time workflows for facial and physique animation.
One other side of the Witcher 4 demo was the dense vegetation within the forest areas. That is made doable by “Nanite Foliage,” a newly added extension to the Nanite virtualization system. The system is designed to render extraordinarily detailed bushes and vegetation in giant numbers with none lack of efficiency.
Nanite Foliage additionally solves issues with dynamically transferring objects resembling swaying bushes and improves integration with the Lumen lighting system. Nevertheless, the total model of this function isn’t anticipated till Unreal Engine 5.7.
