We’re adding a third Tech Stream to our Unity 2023 Editor and Runtime lifecycle to include production-ready additions for graphics, performance, and productivity.
Unity 2023.3 Tech Stream will be released in April 2024, meaning that the Unity 2023 LTS will ship later, towards the end of that year.
Read our blog post for more information and let us know if you have any questions.
Good update post.
The post mentions native renderpass and it being important for optimizing performance.
If I recall correctly multiview/single pass XR (at least on mobile) does not support native renderpass. Is this a feature that will be added with the release?
Thx for the update.
The release milestone image has a typo - you wrote two times 2023.2 even though it should have been 2023.3 the second time ;).
Thank you for flagging, we’ll get it fixed.
Somehow the title is misleading. Like, I naturally expect 2023.3 (LTS) to be released in April 2024. So I wasn‘t sure what I was reading here and what the change really is until I read this: „the Unity 2023 LTS will ship later, toward the end of that year“.
So perhaps the title should read that 2023 LTS will be delayed, which understandably sounds negative. But hey, it may actually get more reads. 
Or just add „2023.3 tech stream“ to the title since a .3 minor version has become synonymous to „LTS“ since 2020.3.
Besides the always welcome updates, maybe focus beforehand on some bug fixing? My list alone of reported and accepted and not fixed issues is growing longer every week, all based on 2022 / 2023 features, and I am not yet done with reporting everything I encountered so far. Some of the newly introduced features in 2022 and 2023 are just broken and not production ready.
Please add Split Graphics Jobs for Metal iOS and Vulkan Android too 
If you need shift release on one additional month for it
Hi. What will happen to release schedule for Unity 2024.1 and later after this announcement?
The blog mentions that by making 2023.3 a tech stream it gets it into our hands sooner, that is only the case if a dev is willing to gamble with using a tech stream and the issues that have historically gone along with that. The entire point of having a verified and stable LTS as previously explained by Unity is wait to use it if you don’t want to be exposed to shifting features, api’s and unexpected bugs. So for us this new change to the release schedule is simply adding another 7-8 months we now have to wait to get access to the next major engine upgrade.
It’s as though the LTS has lost significance now, this is such a long time to wait and will make us consider using a tech stream, back to how things used to be years ago before the LTS was introduced with a higher potential to encounter major issues.
Also, with this change the naming convention has now even more confusing. We’ll be getting 2023 LTS at the end of 2024, just before it turns 2025.
I can appreciate that you need more time to do stabilisation testing before stamping the engine as LTS, but I would rather have less features and a tighter annual cycle to each new LTS, not 18 months.
The yearly schedule, the multiple releases and the tech / LTS tracks don’t work, it’s time to rethink them.
It would make a lot more sense if you cut the amount of tech streams to one per year instead of adding more over many years.
For example, 2024.1 beta could start 2023 Q3. 2024 Q1 it hits tech stream status. 2024 Q3 stabilisation testing starts as development teams change gear to start on 2025.1 beta. Q4 2024.2 hits LTS. This cycle is much simpler to understand, you’d have a single tech stream and a tighter annual LTS cycle.
A lot of devs will be forced to make a choice to use a tech stream in order to gain the latest platform support, cause the engine cycle to LTS is far too long in a fast moving industry.
The current cycle was already sorta 1.5 years since early LTS is unusable and needs 6 months to stabilize, now we’re adding another 6 months at the very least for what ends up now being 2 year cycles.
I didn’t expect the big Visual Scripting rewrite to happen in 2023 cycle but now that’s extended. And if it doesn’t land in 2024 cycle, it’ll be the one after the next. So that’ll be what, the year 2027 or 2028? People were meming about 2026 but at this point it’ll take even longer. It’s somewhat concerning.
And I concur that 2023LTS at the start of the year 2025 makes little sense. Assuming further delays, Unity will be perpetually 2 years out of date semantically.
As if people don’t know what the purpose of this tech stream launch is.
By the way, I was glad to read the title of the blog post. I was all the more disappointed to learn that it means nothing good.
But please leave the article unchanged. This is also reflected in your work on the Unity editor.
Even if you read the article correctly, you get less than what you would actually expect according to the roadmap. Much much less!
Maybe Unity should consider changing how the date system works for releases? If we were starting a new project in 2025, we’d be choosing to use the version named ‘2023 LTS’ which feels odd and confusing to explain to people who aren’t as Unity savvy on the team.
Appreciate the some-what honesty that 2023 needs more time in the oven though (Even when veiled as an upgrade)! More of that, please!
I second the idea of a different versioning system. The year-based versioning only makes sense with regular releases, and to my knowledge it’s never been regular.
I’d also like to point out the issue with less frequent LTS releases - namely asset store support. I started a project on Unity 2023 because there were several improvements that would help my game, and I didn’t want a massively outdated featureset when I eventually ship.
But because assets only support LTS releases, and shaders typically break with each version, this means I will now have to wait until likely 2025 to be able to integrate any shaders from the asset store.
Not a disaster but… that’s a long time.
And a question: The blog post mentions a new version of DLSS but what about FSR? The version 1.0 Unity currently supports is sorely in need of an update.
Nothing changes for Teck stream users as it looks like the 2024.1 will just become 2023.3. For LTS users, however, it means that they have to wait six months longer for the LTS. but have more features.
However, it also means that the features planned for 2024.2 are now coming to an LTS half a year later than before.
I think the main reason is that starting next year they plan to release LTS and Techstream 202X.1 at Unite in the fall.
I’m guessing you’re not talking about 1.XX updates for FSR - although I believe Unity might be lagging on that a tad (1.1 is a version increment, but I’m not sure Unity was on the latest 1.0X before that though). FSR1 is still useful on hardware that can’t handle the overhead of temporal upscalers.
There are some resources available for integrating FSR2 on Unity on GPU open, but it’s not as easy in editor like FSR1 was with some check boxes. It does seem like a lost opportunity (as might lack of a XESS option).
There IS a store solution for FSR2 from Alterego Games which is pretty awesome (they’re also working on DLSS2 for rendering pipelines not covered by what is built-in), but I agree it would have been nice if these options were just handled by Unity. Alterego also has a pretty accessible support for their solution and it works across a huge list of hardware/tech. I do hope that, whenever it is released, that we see FSR3 be something Unity tackles & updates though.
Marketing/PR at Unity forgot how time works… So you release 2023 LTS at the end of 2024 instead of Q1 of 2024 and you put some stuff in it from the 2024 tech stream but you release them at the same time you would release 2024.2 tech release. Brilliant. Same amount of stuff delivered partly later but labelled as earlier. And people at Unity said “okay” to this… ROFL. I’m sorry, but this is genuinely hilarious.
