Case Study: Epic Games achieves dramatic build-time reductions and studio-wide parallelization with Incredibuild

Epic Games - Customer Case Study

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine — a codebase of over two million lines that must be built in many configurations for numerous platforms — faced slow compile and test iteration times that wasted developer time and stretched schedules. To address this, Epic integrated Incredibuild’s distributed computing solution into the engine’s build flow (used from UnrealBuildTool/UBT) rather than relying solely on adding more local CPU cores, which offered limited scaling and caused serialization bottlenecks.

Incredibuild distributed compilation across hundreds of machines in Epic’s network (more than 200 multi‑core systems via UBT), massively parallelizing builds and enabling simultaneous multi‑platform/configuration builds. The result: a UDK 32‑bit Windows release build dropped from 3:00 to 1:37, testing and iteration cycles accelerated, developers spent far less time waiting for builds, and the approach delivers savings measured in man‑years across projects.

Epic Games