Moving to Unreal 6: seven things we learned in week one

We moved an existing project to Unreal 6 with a team of seven. Duration: five working days. This is not an advert, it is a notebook.

1. Shader compilation really did get faster

A cold build went from 41 minutes to 19. Everyone claiming this was telling the truth.

2. Forty percent of materials need manual fixes

Older node-based materials in particular do not convert automatically. The batch tool handles some, the rest is by hand.

3. Memory use went up

Same scene, same settings: 100 MB more. Sounds small; it accumulates across a twelve-hour session.

4. Half of our plugins no longer work

Four of nine had no compatible release. We built two ourselves.

5. Version control got cleaner

Binary asset diffs shrank; two people colliding on one file did not happen once this week.

6. The profiler was rewritten

There is a learning curve, but the GPU timeline reads far better.

7. Waiting is still not worth it

Delay and the cost doubles. It took a week — when planned.