Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney teases Unreal Engine 6: preview in 2-3 years, goal is multi-threaded

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has mentioned its next-gen Unreal Engine 6 technology, saying it is still 2-3 years away from seeding out UE6 previews to game developers.

In the latest episode of the Lex Friedman podcast, Epic CEO Tim Seeney said that the company is currently cooking up its next-gen Unreal Engine 6 technology, and that it will unify the parallel development threads the developer is currently working on. We should expect plenty of upgrades under the hood of UE6, with a big upgrade to multi-threaded performance and removing core limitations that have been inside Unreal Engine for multiple generations now.

I can see a world where Unreal Engine 6 is shown off in a big new Fortnite 2.0 update, as well as UE6-powered games of the future on next-gen console platforms like Sony's next-generation PlayStation 6 console that should be available by the time Unreal Engine 6 hits the market.

Sweeney said: "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".

Sweeney continues: "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".