Unreal Engine 6 will have multithread architecture and unified focus

Epic Games confirmed the first details about the future Unreal Engine 6, marking the beginning of a new stage for the graphics engine that dominates the development of AAA games. The information was revealed by Tim Sweeney, CEO of the company, during an interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, published in April 2025.

The main technical change will be the abandonment of the traditional single-threaded simulation model, which limits the use of multicore CPUs. Currently, even machines with 16 cores or more operate with game logic centralized in a single thread — a bottleneck that UE6 aims to eliminate.

"The single-threaded execution was a choice of simplicity, but now it's an obstacle. We need to distribute workloads like AI, physics, simulation, and animation across multiple cores," said Sweeney. (Free translation)

To achieve this, the engine will undergo a complete redesign of its internal architecture, aiming to implement full multithreading as a central priority. This advancement should allow for more efficient use of modern hardware, both on PCs and on consoles of the current and next generation.

Another highlighted point is the unification of development paths. Currently, there are two branches of the Unreal Engine: one focused on studios and another adapted to the Fortnite ecosystem, which runs on seven platforms simultaneously. In practice, this generates technical fragmentation and incompatibilities. With UE6, the proposal is to consolidate these paths into a single, modular, and more portable base.

The first preview versions of UE6 are expected to be released between 2027 and 2028, with the first commercial games scheduled for 2028 or 2029, following the adoption pace of Unreal Engine 5 — which had its preview in 2022, but only saw its first major titles, like Remnant II and Lords of the Fallen, in 2023 and 2024.

Epic has not yet released an official list of additional features, but the promise is an engine that meets the growing demands for dynamic worlds, advanced rendering, large-scale physics, and parallel computing — pillars for the games of the next decade.

With this, UE6 takes on the mission of preparing the technical groundwork for the new generation of consoles and high-end PCs, reflecting a paradigm shift that developers and studios have been waiting for years.