Unreal Build accelerator on Hathora the "Epic Way"

Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA) is one of the most powerful ways to speed up Unreal Engine development, especially for large C++ or shader-heavy projects. By distributing compilation jobs across a farm of machines, developers can cut build times dramatically. We’ve seen teams reduce builds by up to 90% using UBA.

Two Ways Teams Use UBA

We've seen two common patterns:

1. Local + Burst: Developers build locally most of the time but burst onto a shared build farm to accelerate heavy compiles.
2. Remote Build: Entire builds are offloaded to a remote farm, freeing up local machines and reducing bottlenecks.

Either way, the value is clear: faster iteration, happier devs🤗

UBA ≠ Horde CI

UBA is part of Horde, Epic Games' CI/CD orchestrator built to support Fortnite-scale Unreal Engine projects. Horde offers a lot like CI automation, test dashboards, devkit management, and more, but it's tightly coupled to how Epic works.

As of Unreal Engine 5.5, Epic released Horde + UBA to everyone via “The Epic Way”, their opinionated best practices for large Unreal projects. It works, but it's not easy to adopt:

• Sparse documentation: You often need to dive into engine source to figure things out.
• Hardcoded assumptions: Many workflows are built around Epic's needs. Using it outside of Epic? You’ll likely need to modify the engine.

Note: You don’t need to use Horde CI to get access to UBA. You can set up a Horde server to only do distributed builds.

Hathora Now Supports UBA

At Hathora, we want to make distributed builds accessible and affordable—without needing to buy and manage your own hardware.

We now support UBA workloads on bare metal machines with unbeatable cost and performance:

• 64 vCPU / 128 GB RAM (AMD EPYC Genoa)
• $0.02/vCPU-hour with 30-day commitment
• $0.01 for egress bandwidth
• 70% cheaper than AWS, 100% cheaper bandwidth

Unlike traditional on-prem hardware setups:

• Burst to the cloud when you need extra capacity
• Upgrade hardware anytime: no more being stuck with aging machines
• Skip the datacenter headaches: no rack space, cooling, or hardware failures to manage
• Hybrid-friendly: you can even enroll your existing on-prem machines and use Hathora just for bursting

TL;DR

If you're using UBA, or trying to, Hathora gives you:

• Fast Unreal builds with or without full Horde CI
• Bare-metal level pricing without the lock-in
• The ability to scale up, down, or out as your needs change

Want to try it out or chat through setup? Get in touch.