UE6 to Integrate AI Models, UE5 Update Improves Performance on Switch 2 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 17 June 2026 / 2,701 Views
Epic Games has revealed new details on Unreal Engine 6 and released update 5.8 for Unreal Engine 5, which significantly improves performance on the Nintendo Switch 2.
The updated UE5 comes with Lumen Lite, which adds a lighter version of its Lumen lighting system. Lumen Late reportedly runs twice as fast as the previous version of Lumen. Games that rely on global illumination are now able to run at 60 frames per second on Switch 2.
"LumenLight is designed to preserve much of the visual impact at a significantly lower GPU cost," said Unreal Engine VP of engineering Simon Tourangeau. "That makes Lumen viable where it wasn’t before, including on Switch 2. And that work is already helping drive further nanite optimization efforts for the platform."
Unreal Engine 6 will integrate generative AI models that will give developers the ability "build content faster" and maintain "creative control."
"Our approach with UE6 is shaping up quite differently from how we developed UE4 and UE5. Over the next two years, we’ll be unifying the two major streams of Unreal Engine development—UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite—into a single product: Unreal Engine 6," said Epic Games.
"UE6 will keep doing the things you want Unreal Engine to do. Rendering will keep getting better. Cook times will come down. Iteration loops will get tighter. Mobile is increasingly capable. But UE6 exists distinctly from an incremental UE5 development path because three things about game development need to change at the same time."
UE6 will integrate with AI models such as Claude, Gemini, and more. This will enable teams to "focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks."
"Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the amount of iterations a team can make to polish their content," said Epic. "UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN."
Epic added, "UE6 is going to change a lot about how games are made. It will not change the thing that matters most, which is that the people in this industry—the game developers, the filmmakers, our Unreal Engine family—are the ones who make anything actually happen. Thank you for making Unreal Engine really shine."
Unreal Engine 6 will release in early access around the end of 2027, with a full release expected 12 to 18 months later.
Thanks, VideoGamesChronicle.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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I feel the fight against AI in games is basically dead
I could make some witty remark or rage against AI poisoning the well even more... but at this point I'm just tired. At this point I just want to play games from the few developers who refuse to be suckered into this, and keep this shit firmly off either my PC or Switch 2.
I'm not a grifter so I don't wanna say something deliberately erroneous like "Gaming is Dead" or whatever... but fuck I miss being able to be excited for the next year of the medium instead of hopeless. I love games, that's why this is so painful to watch.
The reason to use UE for developers is to speed up development and not having the cost of development and maintain it themselves. In other words increase productivity. Obviously such tools will continue to evolve with productivity in mind.
There is no closing Pandora's Box.
Does this mean we'll see updates from previous UE5 games on NS2 adding 60fps modes?
That wouldn't be the expectation,
There are very few games running Lumen on Switch 2. This enhances the chances of UE5 games being brought over or getting a more solid 30fps experience.
Upgrading between even minor versions of a game engine can be quite a bit of work, as far as I know. It's also likely a graphical downgrade of some sort, so it would indeed require adding another mode, so games would also probably need to support two modes. I wouldn't necessarily hold my breath unless major support for the game is still expected.
