Unity Is Working On Metal & DX12, But Not Vulkan Yet

Aras Pranckevičius of Unity Technologies presented this week at SIGGRAPH 2015 on porting the popular Unity Engine to new APIs. While Aras has dealt with Vulkan/glNext, Unity is still monitoring the Vulkan situation and isn't yet committing to supporting it in the near-term within its game engine.

Aras talked about the new explicit graphics APIs (namely DX12, Vulkan, and Apple's Metal), challenges for developers, dealing with shaders in the new APIs, initial DX12/Vulkan ports being slower than DX11/OpenGL ports, threading, and other factors.

Unity 5.2 right now doesn't take full advantage of the new APIs yet but there is a lot of code work happening. Soon the Unity developers plan to have more clean-ups, threading for all platforms, and various DirectX 12 / Metal improvements. However, in regards to Unity supporting Vulkan, the last slide mentions, "..we're not doing Vulkan just yet, but keeping it in mind."

Hopefully the Vulkan Unity support will come not too far out given Unity has Linux support and has already been ported to the other next-gen APIs, consoles, OpenGL, etc. The SIGGRAPH 2015 PDF slides can be found here.