Unity 6.1 Beta is now available

Unity Engine
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Hi everyone,

We’re excited to announce the beta release of Unity 6.1 and invite you to participate in early testing. Feedback from our community is critical to getting Unity 6.1 production-ready. We value your input and will have a team of engineers and customer QA folks available here on Unity Discussions to engage with you.

Unity 6.1 builds on the quality, stability, performance, and capabilities shipped in Unity 6 to enable you to deliver to more platforms, with better visuals, more efficiently. Starting with the Unity 6 generation, we’ve changed how we release the Unity Engine so that we can keep improving performance and stability, while making it easier and less disruptive for you to upgrade to the latest update release.

Here are a few highlights you can expect from the Unity 6.1 beta update release:

Quality

  • Bugs & regressions fixed, and new quality of life improvements

Performance

  • Deferred+ - Build richer worlds with our new deferred rendering path that accelerates GPU performance using advanced Cluster-based light culling, and optimizes the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) render loop with GPU Resident Drawer.
  • PSO caching - Achieve smoother rendering with API-level disk-based caching for DX12 Pipeline State Objects (PSOs) across application runs, across all compatible devices.
  • Variable Rate Shading - Improve GPU performance with minimal impact to visuals. Set the shading rate of custom passes within URP and generate Shading Rate Images (SRIs) from textures and shaders.
  • Gfx Jobs for Android - Improve CPU performance when rendering complex content on premium Android devices with the new Graphics Jobs Device Filtering setting.

Platform updates

  • Large screens & foldables - Access enhanced support for large screens and foldables with the latest Android APIs.
  • Unity Web - Remove unused Unity code from .wasm files using a new .wasm file stripping tool package. WebGPU is now publicly available in experimental state, unlocking compute acceleration for web browsers. See our dedicated discussion topic for more information.
  • Build Profiles for Meta Quest and Android XR - Save time and streamline the build process with the ability to create multiple build configurations for release and development builds.
  • Instant Games on Facebook & Messenger - Streamline building, optimizing, and uploading instant games to Facebook and Messenger.

To learn more about what’s in the Unity 6.1 Beta, check out the release notes for a comprehensive list of features.

Join the Beta

Our alpha and beta releases are open to anyone, so no signup is required. Get started by downloading them from the Unity Hub. Because there may be feature stability issues with early test versions, we do not recommend them for projects in production, and we highly recommend that you back up any project before opening it with an alpha or beta release.

Through the 6-1-beta tag, you can hear about further announcements, and discuss the 6.1 Beta with us and the wider community on Unity Discussions. Our goal in sharing beta versions is to identify and resolve any remaining issues to improve overall quality before the official release.

We will announce all 6.1 beta releases in our dedicated release announcements topic here on Unity Discussions. You can choose to receive notifications for new 6.1 beta releases via the bell icon on the right.

If you have any questions or other feedback regarding the beta and its features, be it positive or negative, please let us know about it.

Thanks for participating in the beta!

13 Likes
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Please note, that the build for b1 is incorrectly being labeled as Alpha in the Hub and the About window of the Editor. This will be fixed in the upcoming b2 release.

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Ive seen a couple of interesting quirks with b1, but they arent constent… Havent been able to boil them down, happened in the 6.1 alphas too, good example is where the object names when you set an icon so it shows as a bubble in editor, letters are missing…

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Created a new project using the Mixed Reality (MR) template, and it appears to hang after throwing exceptions when trying to switch to the Android platform.

I’ll file a bug report once I get the editor unstuck (will likely have to kill the process) but I wanted to share the screenshot for now:

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Hi, just out of simple curiosity. Why did you decide to end support for the Live Capture package? It didn’t appear to be broken as far as I was aware of.

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What happened to MeshLODs i thought it was planned for 6.1?

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This already have been discussed here: Cinematics & Virtual Production package deprecation in Unity 6.1

tldr:

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This is a Unity 7 release feature, as I understood from the threads.

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We didn’t specify a release target for MeshLOD yet. The plan is for it to be released within the Unity 6.x generation.

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I’ve not tried the 6.1 stuff and not a lot in it that I think I’d make use of… disappointing is this State of the Enhanced Contextual Menu in Unity 6 still isn’t making a return into 6.1 at least for the windows version (assuming its not, as nothing mentioned in the op about it). The fact it was once in Unity, then removed due to being more broken on non windows platforms, then NeonAge got it working again and then 6.0 came out and broke it and the patched version is also still broken. Like I’m not seeing UE feature drops, so to me this one thing of some modernized UX would be nice to have back already as the small things help alot… so I’m not digging though submenus of submenus trying to find something when the inline context search was a super useful improvement.

4 Likes
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I really don’t understand how the contextual menu is not the biggest priority in the company. For god’s sake, it’s something every unity user uses constantly through the day, and it looks from the 90’s. At least give us the search capabilities please. It’d improve productivity in very big percentages for everyone. I can’t imagine how much would weight through the year…

6 Likes
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What is this and what does it do and is there any documentation on it?

Thanks!

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I believe you can read a bit about that one here.

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Hi-hello.
We tested the Web Stripping Tool (WST). WST was able to cut about 300-400 kilobytes in an empty URP project and about 700 kilobytes in a release project. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s still a very cool innovation. In the future, we will receive other submodules to cut them out, for example physics or Terrain, which is 99% unnecessary, but is delayed due to URP.

3 Likes
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Hi! Did “Infinite import loop” issue got fixed? I was forced to remove Unity 6 and go back to 2022 LTS version because of it. Hope it gets fixed soon!
(Happens if i switch platfrom from PC to any other one (Android) or add any plugin which modifies Scripting Define Symbols. It’s starting to either endlessly compile shaders/scripts or throws errors each time i update scripts or use Ctrl + R to reload.)

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Did you all change something with lighting?

1 Like
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Anyone else seeing things like this?

6.0 looks like

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6.1 looks like

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Note the icons been set for a bunch of objects in 6.1 the names miss loads of characters, now, it doesnt do it on a blank project… but tbh there really aint anything special going on here

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Same on 6.1.0a9. Also, when I’m trying to select an icon with text for any game object, it will throw “Use of GfxDeviceD3D12::UploadTexture2D is forbidden during a render pass!” in the console.

1 Like
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glad its not just me, oddly i tried it on a blank project and it was all fine