Unity 6.3 Beta is now available

[jasonmann3d]

Hi everyone,

We’re excited to announce the beta release of Unity 6.3, which will be the next LTS when it enters GA (general availability). Your feedback is valuable and will help us get Unity 6.3 production-ready. We invite you to try out the new features and improvements, and will have a team of engineers and customer QA folks available here on Unity Discussions to engage with you.

Unity 6.3 LTS

Unity 6.3 continues to build on our focus on stability, performance, and expanded platform reach. We have continued to improve how we achieve stability faster with the 6.1 and 6.2 Update releases, and are applying these learnings to 6.3. When 6.3 enters GA it will be supported with two-year LTS, with an additional year of support for Unity Enterprise and Unity Industry users. At that time, the Unity 6.2 Update release will no longer be supported.

Unity 6.0 LTS, which released October 2024, will continue to be supported with a two-year LTS, with an additional year of support for Unity Enterprise and Unity Industry users.

A note on breaking changes

While our goal is for every release in the 6.x series to be a completely seamless upgrade experience, we also need to balance that goal against the need to evolve the product. You can keep track of the small number of planned breaking changes in Unity 6.3 in our dedicated topic.

What’s new in the 6.3 beta

Here are a few highlights you can expect:

Quality of life and production efficiency improvements:

• UI Toolkit: Support for customizable UI shaders, UI post-processing filters, and Scalable Vector Graphics in UI. Learn more.

• Render 3D as 2D: Enhancements to 3D renderers that can be displayed with depth or 2D sorting rules while maintaining full compatibility with 2D lighting. Works with sorting layers, orders, groups, and sprite masks. Learn more.

• Shader Graph: Support for 8-texture coordinates to create advanced terrains, characters, or effects, nested properties and keywords to simplify the usage of SubGraphs, and new template browser to quickly getting started with any kind of shader (Lit and unlit surfaces, decals, post processing, UI, sprites, particles, 6-way lighting,…). Learn more. Added Shader Graph support for terrain shaders. Learn more. Added Custom Lighting sample to learn how to do stylization. Learn more.

• Render Graph: We’ve expanded the Render Graph utility passes to support more use cases and provide greater flexibility, made the compatibility mode hidden behind a compilation flag for faster iteration, smaller builds, and cleaner code structure, added the ability to connect the Render Graph viewer to a device, and shared the Render Graph Foundation Across URP and HDRP to simplify the code base. Learn more.

• Multiplayer: Added HTTP/2 support. Host migration in Netcode for Entities uses Unity Gaming Services to allow a client-hosted networking experience to continue after the loss of the host.

• Native desktop screen reader support: This extends the platform coverage of Unity’s screen reader support APIs beyond Android and iOS (introduced in Unity 6.0), making it possible for you to build apps and games that are accessible to screen readers across all major platforms supported by Unity. Learn more.

• Audio: Scriptable Audio Pipeline and Enhanced Audio Foundation. The Scriptable Audio Pipeline is a framework that lets you extend the audio signal chain via Burst-compiled C# units called Scriptable Processors. The Enhanced Audio Foundation (EAF), an improved and more flexible Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that brings immediate benefits such as improved stability when swapping devices and higher quality sample rate conversion. Learn more.

Performance and profiling improvements:

• Profiler Capture Highlights and Capture List: The Profiler Highlights module provides a simple statistical data view summarizing profiling data, integrated into the Unity Profiler. This serves as an entry point for new users and gives quick “preliminary advice” for experienced users.

• Optimized lightmap memory: Added xAtlas, to produce more tightly packed lightmaps, saving VRAM and disk space usage. Learn more.

• Improved batching for renderers with custom data: New MeshRenderer and SkinnedMeshRenderer shader user value API to set per-renderer unsigned int values retrievable in shader code. Enables SRP batching across renderers with dynamic custom values at runtime. Alternative to material property blocks. Learn more.

• Optimized post processing for mobile and untethered XR: Added URP Bloom options for mobile (Kawase filtering, optimized for smaller resolutions and Dual filtering for larger resolutions). Coming soon in Beta, a specialized post processing renderer feature to run effects like vignetting, tonemapping, color grading, dithering and film grain on untethered XR devices like Meta Quest with optimal performance on tile based GPUs.

• Sprite Atlas Analyser: Provides reports to identify common inefficiencies in atlasing.

• 2D Animation Performance Improvements: Refactored IK system for multi-threading, cached deformed sprites, optimized single-bone mesh deformation, reduced bone data redundancy, and eliminated unnecessary post-deformation operations.

To learn more about what’s in the Unity 6.3 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 6-3-beta tag, you can hear about further announcements, and discuss the 6.3 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 6.3 beta releases in our dedicated release announcements topic here on Unity Discussions. You can choose to receive notifications for new 6.3 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!

Latest Release
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[stonstad]

Hi Jason!

Does 6.3 contain performance improvements for Unity’s DirectX 12 implementation? Many developers continue to see significant performance regressions compared to DirectX 11.

See

Why is DX12 so much slower than DX11?

Here is a comparison of two identical scenes using D3D11 and D3D12. These are built players with debugging enabled and remote profiling enabled. Unity 6.2 x64 Debug Build Resolution 3840x2160. VSync Off. RTX 4090 AMD 7950, 64 GB Memory Built-In Render Pipeline Profiler Data (.data) https://stellarconquest.blob.core.windows.net/tmp/unity/D3D11.data https://stellarconquest.blob.core.windows.net/tmp/unity/D3D12.data Results [Unity 6.2 D3D11 vs D3D12 Comparison Screenshot] [UNITY_6_2_D3D11_…

Is performance parity planned between DX12 and DX11?

I still have open issues I reported including test project, e.g.: Not sure how much additional bug reports help on this, as it’s pretty obvious and easily reproducible. I don’t think the statement of Unity about DX12 being faster in majority of use cases is true, actually I always hear the opposite from Users. As soon as a project is GPU bound, which probably will be most projects running DX12, DX11 ist faster, for the reasons Unity stated above. What did increase is stability, but there is …

Why is DX12 so much slower than DX11?

I recently upgraded a project from Unity 2022.3 to Unity 6.2, to test all the new performance stuff. GPU Resident Drawer, GPU Occlusion Culling, and Split Graphics Jobs all seem to be straight up wins. Unfortunately, DX12 is still significantly slower than DX11 in our project, too. Here’s some quick comparisons. DX12: [tHI2VD4Uaw] DX11: [7tRX3ngJ6I]

I do not believe these cases are outliers. In my game, I’m seeing a 20% frame time difference and as a result, I cannot ship on DirectX 12.

Thanks,
Shaun

[Onigiri]

I think you forgot to add new low level 2d physics to the list of features.

[KingdomCompiled]

Really awesome to see!

For our RTS we use UI Toolkit already the past year, I’ve been developing the core and UI. I find it’s so nice to work with!

We’ve made custom elements for a minimap, gradients, health bars and some other small small things. The binding system works great, localization flawlessly, tooltips, performance and your ebook/docs are good a good help.

Also would space we used since 6.0 or 6.1 through the developer mode in unity.

We’ve made a beautiful and responsive interface through your APIs and base UI toolkit stuff. Happy to see how much love it has been getting recently! Especially because we only want to use UI TK.

I might check out the beta soon! But keep up the good work!

[GF-Huang]

I’m more concerned about when the bug with spherical articulation bodies will be fixed.

Why do Articulation bodies still shaking, even though I’ve already increased the solver iterations? - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions

[graskovi]

The support for batching with custom unsigned integers is exciting as it means free(ish) custom data such as a color, but it seems from the documentation like we will only have access to the single unity_RendererUserValue unsigned integer, i.e. we cannot have multiple colors for example. Is there any chance we’ll be able to have more than 1 piece of data made available via this API in the future?

[Laicasaane]

@graskovi

Is there any chance we’ll be able to have more than 1 piece of data made available via this API in the future?

You should ask that question here: Renderer Shader User Value: Customize your visual per renderer

[aricmcbay]

Thanks for these exciting updates! I especially look forward to trying out Shader Graph for terrain.

[Adrian]

@graskovi

Is there any chance we’ll be able to have more than 1 piece of data made available via this API in the future?

You should check out the dedicated thread for the user value. The idea is that you use the user value as an index to a global buffer if you need more data than the value itself provides.

[R0fael_dev]

It would be useful though.

[rustum]

Hi @Onigiri & @R0fael_dev ! While not specifically called out in the highlights above, please visit the new low-level 2D Physics topic here and we can discuss it in detail.

[Matjio]

Hi @stonstad,

Thanks for your tests and for gathering the feedback.

Bear with us; DX12 has only been the default since 6.1, and we need to take this step to guarantee coverage of a wide range of use cases. DX12 is also important to unlock features like raytracing, PSO tracing and warmup, native render passes, variable rate shading, and more to come like the DXC compiler and associated benefits. So your feedback is extremely valuable.

Our team is hard at work, monitoring and addressing feedback and bugs, and we are continuously working on optimizations and improvements for DX12, also working closely with multiple game productions.

In 6.3, we are adding:

• device filtering to automatically fall back on DX11 for GPUs with poor support of DX12 (this is where most of our instabilities issues remain), and to also choose the optimal threading mode
• memory optimizations to reduce VRAM usage and improve performance (as we profiled and noticed it was a common cause of regressing GPU performance)

More information will come soon in a dedicated Discussions post.

Note: It is important to test on release builds, since in DX11 a lot of the work was done on the driver side, which is now required to be done on the engine side.

Thanks,
Mat

[Qleenie]

this sounds promising! FYI: most use cases in the linked threads were actually compared in builds (separate builds for DX11 and DX12). It actually shows most of the time that the difference you experience in Editor will have same ratio in a build, though.

[AndreaGalet]

Which GPUs are having issues with DX12?

[stonstad]

@Matjio

Our team is hard at work, monitoring and addressing feedback and bugs,

Hi @Matjio

Thank you for the helpful replies. Did you see these questions relating to DX12 performance?

@stonstad

Understanding Unity’s DirectX Implementation

• Why is WaitOnSwapChain so much slower in D3D12?
• What is PostLateUpdate.FinishFrameRendering, and why is it dramatically slower in D3D12?
• The additional D3D12 rendering methods add 0.62 ms of frame time. Is this the intended behavior?

From Why is DX12 so much slower than DX11? - #260 by stonstad

[stonstad]

@Qleenie

most use cases in the linked threads were actually compared in builds (separate builds for DX11 and DX12). It actually shows most of the time that the difference you experience in Editor will have same ratio in a build, though.

Totally agree! DX11 vs DX12 performance test results scale proportionally between the editor, debug builds, and release builds. The results I shared were from debug builds with a profiler attached. But I saw the same performance gap in release builds.

[stonstad]

@AndreaGalet

Which GPUs are having issues with DX12?

My RTX 4090 runs Unity DX12 slower than DX11. The idea that it’s just legacy cards that struggle with Unity’s DX12 implementation is false.

[Qleenie]

I measured on 4090, 3080, 2080 super mobile. Behavior is more or less same across all GPUs tested, difference of about 10% in GPU time.

[Matjio]

GPUs not supporting well DX12 and that will fallback through device filtering are some very old desktop GPUs, and multiple laptops integrated GPUs.
We suspect that perf issues with recent cards like yours on the other hand might come from memory management and synchronization.