The State of Unreal 2025 is behind us – take a quick look at everything important that Epic Games showed. (Image source: Epic Games)
Today the unreal festival started in Orlando in 2025. Of course, the developers of Epic Games were concerned with the innovations of the Unreal Engine and The Witcher 4, who had previously announced themselves to the festivities.
The Witcher 4: A technical demo in Unreal Engine 5.6
The absolute highlight of the State of Unreal keynote was undoubtedly that Demonstration von The Witcher 4.
- In contrast to the previous announcements with pre -ended trailers, CD Project Red and Epic Games scenes from the current level of development of the game.
- However, it should be noted: The images shown are a technical presentation in the context of the unreal engine 5.6 and not real gameplay, such as CD projekt red explained in the associated message.
The tech demo led the players to the previously unknown region of Kovir, where protagonist Ciri, together with her horse Kelpie, travels through snowy mountain landscapes and dense forests.
Unreal Engine 5.6: Focus on performance and open-world development
In parallel to the Witcher demo, Epic Games announced the immediate availability of Unreal Engine 5.6. The new version concentrates According to the notification to optimize open world games and achieve constant 60-FPS performance for current console hardware.
Lumen optimizations
One of the most important improvements concerns the lumen system for global lighting:
- According to Epic Games, the hardware-side raytracing implementation was fundamentally revised and is intended to eliminate CPU bottlenecks.
- The optimizations are intended to bring the Hardware-Raytracing variant of Lumen to the performance level of the software-based solution, which releases appropriate CPU resources for other systems.
Link to YouTube content
»Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin«
Another central feature of Unreal Engine 5.6 is the (still experimental) “Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin”.
- According to the developers, this system enables large amounts of static geometry to be loaded faster and more with more constant frame rates.
- For open-world games, Epic Games promises more fluid transitions between different areas without disturbing loading times or break-ins of the frame rate
Renderer parallelization and more
The render hardware interface (RHI) was extensively revised to better use the multithreading skills of modern hardware. So far, certain rendering operations have been limited to the render thread, although current graphics APIs such as DirectX 12, Vulkan and Metal support parallel processing. These restrictions were canceled in version 5.6, such as Epic Games in the Release notes explained.
»MetaHuman Creator«, Epics Tool for creating photorealistic digital people, also received fresh updates. The system is now integrated directly into the unreal editor and offers new parametric body systems and improved visual quality.
- In The Witcher 4, Metahuman is used for the representation of NPCs, which means that even secondary characters achieve a high degree of realism.
- The new “Metahuman Animator”, on the other hand, enables real-time workflows for facial and body animations.
For example, an example of the NPC faces created in the “Metahuman Creator” in Unreal Engine 5.6.
Another aspect of the Witcher 4 demo was the dense vegetation in the forest areas. This is made possible by “Nanite Foliage” to expand the nanite virtualization system. The system should be able to represent extremely detailed trees and plants in large numbers without loss of performance.
Nanite Foliagage also solves problems with dynamically moving objects such as fluctuating trees and improves integration with the lumen lighting system. However, the full version of this feature is only expected with unreal engine 5.7.
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