Unity has released a new beta version of its Unity Engine to all Unity users, including Personal Edition users. And as the title suggests, the key new feature of the Unity 5.6 beta is its support for the Vulkan API.
According to Unity, developers can expect a rendering performance improvement out-of-the box up to 60% using Unity, and that is without having to deal with any specifics of the Vulkan API.
As Unity claimed:
“Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs on desktop and mobile platforms. It’s designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores by allowing multiple threads to run in parallel. This means increased speed with reduced driver overhead and CPU workload, leaving the CPU free to do additional computation or rendering.”
Unity 5.6 beta also includes a lot of improvements for overall graphics, including the Metal Compute, Particle System and GPU Instancing.
Unity plans to add some really cool new features in the next beta version of Unity 5. One of them is the new Progressive Lightmapper for baked lightmaps providing fast iterations and predictable ETA. Furthermore, Unity will add Light modes.
“Light modes are replacing mixed mode lighting, providing flexible and efficient ways to merge baked and realtime shadows. This come with the ability to bake shadowmasks, providing seamless “past realtime shadow distance” shadows. The result will be a high reduction in realtime shadow distance for increased performance. Realtime shadow fade out has been added for every light type and rendering path.”
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They can start with that horribly unoptimized “Adam” demo.
Shame a lot of the horrible performing Unity 4 games on Steam will never be upgrade to this latest version.
What? No 20% inferior performance like DX12 post releae patches??
There will be no “post release patch” with Vulkan for DX11 games. Its not possible to create such patch without rewrite whole game. Xbox One, DX11 and DX12 share common language HLSL for shaders. So developers can create single game code for Xbox and PC. Its not possible with Vulkan because it use another language SPIR for shaders shared with OoenGL. Only games created in OpenGL (with shaders in SPIR) can be upgraded to Vulcan by post release patch
You obviously missed the irony mate 😉
* I was talking about the poor performance of patched in DX12 updates compared to Vulkan performance in general. I am well aware there won’t be any Vulkan patches…
For amd 🙂
Dat ist gudt news mein friendt.
Awesome! It’ll probably be a while before the engine and developers are finally able to make good use of this, but I’ll happily take Vulkan support where ever I can get it.
60%? I’ll believe it when I see it. We have already seen Vulkan in different engines perform no where near that figure so why would it be different with Unity.
Would love to know how they got that figure.
Doom ran roughly that much better on my system with Vulkan.
Confirmed!
It would be a blessing to have devs put their money where their mouth is and actually support the PC platform with a platform/system agnostic API instead of useless and uneffective post-release DX12 patches.
Would make more sense than adding bloatware you can’t run anyway because of crappy performance…
only on AMD…let me fix that
“Unity Engine now supports the Vulkan API, promises 60% performance improvement out-of-the-box for AMD GCN GPU’s. “
Next step: Run on more than one damn core.
That’s a next step all around, it seems…..
*mutters something about “the battle” being over…..*
*cough cough*
Yes, this battle is over. Unity support DX11, DX12, Metal, OpenGL for many years… but there are no single AAA game using this engine. Unity is only used for small indie games or games for mobile. But on mobile all games use OpenGL ES – only existing API shared by IPhone and Android. Mobile Vulkan is supported only by Android 7 used by less than 1% of users. Google doesn’t allow using Vulcan with more popular Android 4 and 5. Apple doesn’t allow Vulkan at all on IPhone or Mac
There are no real reason to use Vulkan, This API don’t work on Mac and don’t work on game consoles. Linux is less than 1% of PC gamers and Steam OS is over (no single new Steam Machine in 2016). Most gamers already changed Windows to Windows 10. Even Intel and AMD drop support for Windows 7, 8.1 in new their CPU’s (Kaby Lake, Apollo Lake, AMD Ryzen). All new PC have preinstalled Windows 10 and users can’t downgrade to Windows 7 because old systems doesn’t work with new CPU’s.
This battle is over. Deal with it
ReCore is using Unity engine. Also No Man’s Sky is made with modified version of this engine. SuperHot also.
Three small indie games with not very good reviews? That’s all? This is not AAA engine
BTW: ReCore is UWP game so it can’t use Vulcan. Games created with UWP must be universal between PC and Xbox so it can’t use Vulkan because that API is not available on game consoles.
Indie or not they are commercial games, and all are know titles, No Man’s Sky is especially “known” ;] if you know what i mean.
With ReCore i was reffering to your “Unity is only used for small indie games”-quote. Not reffering to the DX11,Vulkan ect.
btw. the Unity Adam tech demo run in dx11@1200p on my old GTX660Ti with 30fps+, it is not 60fps but anyway it was running high settings and was fluid. Engine It is quite good imho, many developers tend to stick to Unreal engine since it probably has better tools and it’s also better developed thru all these years of it’s iterations.
Hearthstone uses Unity.
Could it be that Blizzard found it to be the best tool as opposed to designing their own engine. I think it is the first game they’ve made in a long time which doesn’t use an inhouse engine.
SC2 (custom engine), WC3 (custom engine), WoW (custom engine), Overwatch (custom engine), D3 (custom engine), D2 (custom engine), WC2 (custom engine), SC1 (custom engine), WC1 (custom engine).
I think if Blizzard is willing to use Unity instead of rolling their own engine, Unity is good enough. Only for specific types of games perhaps. But still a viable choice for some. Might and Magic 10 also was in unity. Not 100% sure if that quiet qualifies at AAA.
But it is a well established series which has age, and spent a long time being published by an AAA publisher.
Most developers which are AAA companies have utilized unity to allow easy porting of mobile games to desktop.
Wow, good point!
*cough Escape from Tarkov cough*
Sure, it’s not “Battlefield 1 AAA-grade”, but it’s at least an AA, I’d say. Either way, it’s not a “small indie” or a “mobile” game, so, yeah…..
“Most gamers already changed Windows to Windows 10.”
What? The delusion is strong with this one, as ever.
“Even Intel and AMD”
Here, let me fix that for you; “Microsoft”
“All new PC have preinstalled Windows 10 and users can’t downgrade to Windows 7 because old systems doesn’t work with new CPU’s.”
Extremely subjective, & you know it. As long as the hardware supports Windows 7, there’s nothing Microsoft can legally do to block them from downgrading, so…. “deal with it.”
“As long as the hardware supports Windows 7, there’s nothing Microsoft can legally do to block them ”
Kaby Lake doesn’t support Windows 7 and 8.1. You can check that info on Intel support page. How you want use your 7-years old system with new CPU? This is not possible. It doesn’t work
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6e321ee7dddf83cdf989a1679b7f71bbaa9a32e0fc51739d8985cdcda3ff4413.jpg
“Most gamers already changed Windows to Windows 10” – What? The delusion is strong with this one.
Are you sure? There are more gamers using Windows 10 than gamers on all other systems combined. Deal with it
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/115ca8116a95398df1cee3ccf03fb694527c6b6c7ebf33cc5614e26fc008ee52.jpg
Official & unofficial support are two different things. As I’ve already said to your sycophantic *ss before, due to the massive similarities between Kaby Lake & its predecessor (thank the lazy c*nts at Intel for that), there’s a very high probability that it’ll work just fine on Windows 7 regardless of Microsoft’s official support or not.
Also, community patches. Windows XP still has community-made security updates, you know, so there’s really no reason to assume the same won’t happen with Windows 7.
Half of Steam =/= “most”, we’ve been over this multiple times already, kiddo.
Also, it’s really just sad that you keep saying that nobody cares about my “8 year old system” you know, especially since DX11.0 is still the default API for the entire industry, whereas your “15 months old” system is still stuck begging for sh*tty port jobs.
So, tell me again, who cares about what, exactly? Yeah, that’s right, so deal with it already, & stop being such a sad shill.
“Official & unofficial support are two different things”
Are you seriously think that someone will create own custom version of Windows 7 with own written drivers for unsupported CPU such as Kaby Lake or AMD Ryzen? Dream more.
Yes. Mantle-V has won. Now Mantle-X will hopefully be relegated to history.
i call bs, dx12 and vulkan promised the world, and delivered barely anything, on the topic of graphics, i feel like more developers are getting lazy, and simply putting the resolution scaler in the options instead of you know optimizing the game.
Companies made stupid “promises” but it does not say anything about what the API’s can or can not do/allow.
“i feel like more developers are getting lazy”
Or it tames time for significant code re-writes. Which it does. Any programmer will tell you this. Especially with how big the code bases are getting, now.
Absolutely, but that doesn’t explain why the entire development community is getting sh*t performance out of DX12, when they were instantly producing results with Mantle.
Yes, yes, “different code” bla bla bla, so what? Civilization: Beyond Earth had a slap-stick Mantle job attached to it, & it showed clear gains. Civilization VI got a DX12 mode, & it shows all of jack sh*t.
But which big AAA games will use Unity engine?
NASCAR Heat Evolution, ReCore, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, RollerCoaster Tycoon World & Torment: Tides of Numenera are the big AAA games of 2016.
As for 2017 most of the upcoming Unity Engine games are of course indies.
Assassins Creed Empire
-60% for NVIDIA cards pre-Pascwell, +0% for Pascwell cards.
Obviously this is great news for Assassin’s Creed Empire.
And after Unity and Syndicate, I have a good feeling ancient Egypt is going to look absolutely incredible.
So does this mean that games made in Unity, could simply change to a Vulkan renderer, and see the 60% improvement with very little work or fuss?I’m confused by the ‘Out of the box’ remark.