Unreal Build Accelerator Generally Available

We are now ready to enable Unreal Build Accelerator for anyone using Universal Foundry. UBA allows individual compile jobs to be distributed across multiple computers by sending individual C++ files out to agents and returning the compiled binaries. If you’ve used tools like Incredibuild or FastBuild, you’ll be familiar with what you can expect from UBA.

In our testing, for full rebuilds, UBA has yielded up to an 80% reduction in build times.

There are two ways to leverage UBA:

CI Compiles - Horde build agents can use UBA to offload parts of the compile from the agent itself to other workers.

Local Compiles - Developers can accelerate local builds using UBA. The workflow is the same as a regular compile.

Pricing - We configure UBA with an always-on agent for $200/mo which provides for 2 vCPUs and then $0.07 / vCPU-hour for usage beyond that. This ends up costing roughly the same per build as using one of our stock compile agents.

You’ll need to be on UE 5.5+ to take advantage of UBA.

Upcoming Improvements

• Shader Compilation - UBA also supports building shaders which has the potential to greatly reduce one of the biggest pains for content creators. If you’d like to pilot this functionality, let us know.
• UBA Cache - Epic has released a tool that allows the results of UBA agents to be cached allowing teams to share the results of each individual C++ file. Obviously this is another huge performance improvement but from what we’re heard the reliability isn’t quite ready for us to turn it on.