I really hope this performs much better than UE5. Maybe they announced it already to favor early adoption and move from UE5 as quickly as possible.

I remember Tim Sweeney did a interview last year where he talked a little about his plans for Unreal 6. From what I remember the most exciting change from a performance standpoint was making the Game Simulation Logic no longer run on a single thread. Only downside of this is it harder not easier to program game logic on multiple threads but I still think it worth it for the performance advantages, it 2026 limited anything to one thread at this point seem so dated.

Complete list of changes I remember he mentioning is

1) Make Game Simulation Multithreaded
2) Combining Unreal Editor for Fortnite into Unreal Engine
4) Adding the Verse Programming Language (currently used in unreal editor for Fortnite but not unreal engine 5)
3) Metaverse something something

UE5 always felt like it was too ambitious for console hardware; Lumen, Nanite, and VSM tended to absolutely tank performance.

Their priority for UE6 should be to get it running well on the hardware people actually have rather than shooting for the moon.

UE5.6 is supposed to be much better optimized. We'll see how well when games designed for it (like Witcher 4) release and if those improvements carry over to UE6.

At a quick glance, that actually seems like a really good language. There's some less typical parts I'd have to get more experience with to form a proper opinion, but my initial impression of the language is really good.

Hopefully; thus far the engine's been disappointing to say the least. They have been some good looking games on it like Hellblade II and Layers of Fear, and Witcher 4 does look phenomenal if what they've shown so far is legit, but so often it seems to bring with it blurry resolutions and other steep compromises.

UE5 has felt somewhat like a beta test that still needs to have it's core features finalised (i.e only getting nanite foliage at the end of the gen/Lumen being very unstable etc) but people are way too harsh towards it. At it's core, just like UE4 it's easily the most accessible engine and makes the job of making games much easier, especially for small teams/teams on a budget.

The fundamental issue is that the "next-gen" features are heavy, but that applies across all engines. Even in RE engine the minute you take Ray trayced global illumination into an open world you're looking at a 30fps cap (Dragons Dogma) and average image quality. Snowdrop seems more efficient as it can  reliably combine RT with Virtual Geometry in a solid release (Avatar + Star Wars Outlaws) but even then Star Wars Outlaws has bad image quality and an unreliable 60fps in the performance modes. The truth is systems weren't built with achieving all these feats whilst meeting 60fps.

It's clear though that effort is being put into making these features lighter but that takes time and developers ultimately need to do be doing optimisation on their end too, as well as saying no to certain graphic features. There's a reason why so few Sony games use RT Global Illumination or Virtual Geometry, They're prioritising last gen rendering techniques to actually deliver the highest quality visuals and adapting engines to their needs (Saros is based on heavily modified UE5 for example + Guerilla and Insomniac have their own upsampling techniques).

Not every team is going have support/talent for that level of bespoke engineering but plenty of AAA games could afford it but they just don't prioritise it.

Can't be worse than UE5? Even on my 4090, UE5 is crap. UE4 runs incredibly well. Maybe they just want to move off UE5, which doesn't hurt my feelings.

What games are you thinking of? Unless you mean the engine launcher/developer side of things.

When people say x engine runs crap, they're actually talking about specific games with their own levels of optimisation and use of features.

For example I doubt anyone is saying Arc Raiders or Avowed runs like crap on their hardware. 

Meanwhile RE Engine can give you brilliant output like RE9 or it can give you Monster Hunter Worlds and Dragons Dogma.

Just based on the games I have tried with UE5, I certainly haven't played them all.  But SH2 Remake, Oblivion Remaster and Borderlands 4.  Small data set, thus, to your point, might not be entirely accurate.  I had to run all those at 1440p on a 4090 to get a stable framerate.