Iris Replication System

Development Programming & Scripting Multiplayer & Networking
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Hello everyone,

I recently watched an insightful Unreal Fest Orlando 2025 session about the development of Iris. My question is, how reliable is the system in the current experimental state? There’s more official documentation available for Iris now compared to Replication Graph, which was discussed back in 2018. In the talk, the speaker also showed a slide indicating that Iris was ported to Fortnite in 2022, with bug fixes continuing up until 2024.

I’m particularly interested in whether Fortnite uses the same version of Iris that we have access to, or if there is a separate internal version not available to the public.

Also, is there a more certain date when Iris will be released as beta at least? Is it a viable option to start learning instead of the traditional Replication Graph? The clear separation of replication from the game thread already looks very attractive to me.

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for learning purposes Iris is worth the time, the Fortnite port since 2022 means the core already handles large-scale replication and the 5.7 beta label reflects that maturity. the public branch matches the concepts even if the internal game has extra tuning, so skills transfer.

start with the official migration and filtering docs on a small project with the log confirming the Iris system creation, and keep replication graph study for legacy maintenance rather than new work.

you can also look at Iris Readiness Kit, an Iris replication plugin that confirms the live replication system on a learning project: Iris Readiness Kit — Audit Your Project Before Enabling Iris Replication | Fab there’s a shorts playlist on iris filtering basics too: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWrCzz951TwA