Unity 2019.1 Beta Deprecates Linux x86, Offers Up Many Vulkan & Linux Improvements

Unity Tech has put out their first public beta of the upcoming Unity 2019.1 game engine update. There's some notable work on both the Linux and Vulkan fronts.

Unity 2019.1 beta headlining features include incremental garbage collection support, implementing more GPU lightmapper functionality, particle improvements, and a number of enhancements to the Android platform support. For game developers making use of Unity there are also editor improvements with a number of new features as well as H.265 video transcode, NVIDIA OptiX AI denoiser, and other bits.

On the Linux front, the Linux x86 (non-x86_64) support is considered deprecated and will be removed in the future. Other Linux work includes taking care of some editor bugs, crash fixes, GPU skinning support on Vulkan, the GPU lightmapper preview now works on Linux, and other fixes.

With Vulkan there is a lot of improvements within Unity 2019.1. The Unity video player on Android can now be used with the Vulkan renderer, a crash fix for the editor when switching between graphics APIs, the mentioned GPU skinning support with Vulkan on Linux, initial sparse texture support, a native rendering plugin support, wide color gamut support on mobile (as well as for OpenGL ES), and other mobile Vulkan platform improvements.

More details on the Unity 2019.1 public beta via blogs.unity3d.com.