Unity 5.6 Beta Rolls Out With Vulkan, Early "Unity 2017" Plans

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 13 December 2016 at 10:28 AM EST. 8 Comments
LINUX GAMING
Unity has announced their 5.6 beta with Vulkan support while they have published some early information about Unity 2017, their successor to Unity 5.

Unity 5.6 is now out in public beta and it features Vulkan support, support for compute with Apple's Metal API, a new progressive lightmapper, a new video player, Google Daydream and Cardboard support, and handling for Facebook's Gameroom.

Unity 5.6 is seeing about an out-of-the-box improvement of up to 60% when switching to the Vulkan API and game developers not having to deal with any specifics of the Vulkan API. For the final release of the Unity 5.6, Vulkan support is planned for Android, Windows, Linux, and Tizen.

All the exciting details about the Unity 5.6 beta via the Unity blog.

Unity 5.6 will mark the end of Unity 5 and after that they will go to a year-based versioning system, thus Unity 2017 is up next. This blog post talks about some early plans for Unity 2017. Unity 2017 will focus upon more core engine optimizations, a fully multi-threaded job system (great news for Vulkan!), a new timeline feature, and new platform support including Nintendo Switch support. The Unity 2017 beta is expected in April.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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