Rendering improvements
This new Beta release brings you significant performance enhancements Unity’s render pipelines to speed up production and more tooling and possibilities to boost visual quality across platforms.
In the Unite keynote we featured the demo Fantasy Kingdom Unity 6 which showcases performance boosts that are unlocked through GPU Resident Drawer, GPU Occlusion Culling, and the Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP). This demo is a modified and expanded version of “Fantasy Kingdom” by Synty Studios.
GPU Resident Drawer
Efficiently render larger, richer worlds. Optimize your games with up to 50% CPU frame-time reduction for GameObjects when rendering large complex scenes without the need for complicated manual optimizations across all platforms including high-end mobile, PC, consoles. You can find more information on GPU Resident Drawer in the Forum post.
GPU Resident Drawer demonstrating reducing batches from 137K to 13K in the Fantasy Kingdom Unity 6 demo.
GPU Occlusion Culling
Working alongside the GPU Resident Drawer, boost performance of GameObjects by reducing the amount of over-draw for each frame, which means the renderer is not wasting resources drawing things that are not seen. This happens dynamically, and is especially effective when the scene has a lot of instancing.
Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing ( STP )
Optimize GPU performance and significantly enhance visual quality and runtime performance with this new state-of-the-art upscaler. STP is designed to take frames rendered at a lower resolution and upscale them without any loss of fidelity, delivering high quality content to platforms and with varying levels of performance capabilities and screen resolutions.
Render graph - URP
The new RenderGraph system for the Universal Render Pipeline automates runtime resource optimization, simplifying memory usage and enhancing performance especially on mobile GPUs. Its stricter API guidelines minimize rendering errors and performance issues, and the integration of the NativeRenderPass API and comprehensive debug viewer aid in efficient troubleshooting and resource management. Additionally, the new ContextContainer class offers streamlined access to rendering resources, improving ease of use and control in complex projects.
Foveated rendering for VR platforms - URP
The new Foveated Rendering API is fully supported by the Universal Render Pipeline allowing you to configure the Foveation Level, improving GPU performance at the cost of reduced fidelity around the user’s mid/far peripheral. Two foveation modes are available, depending on the XR device’s hardware capabilities. In the case of Fixed Foveated Rendering, regions in the center of the screen space benefit from higher quality, and in the case of Gazed Foveated Rendering eye tracking is used to determine which regions of the screenspace benefit from higher quality.
The Foveated Rendering API is compatible with the PS VR2 plugin and Meta Quest through Oculus XR plug-in, with support for the OpenXR plug-in coming soon.
Volume framework enhancements with Custom Post Processing
We are making the Volume framework a first class citizen for both URP and HDRP, optimizing CPU performance on all platforms to make it viable even on low-end hardware, and allowing users to set global and per quality levels volumes in URP similarly to what was possible in HDRP with an improved UX across the board. Additionally, it is now easier to leverage the Volume framework with custom post-processing effects with URP to build your own effects like a custom fog (check this demo from our December live stream to learn more).
C# Light Probe Baking API
With Unity 6 we introduce a new API for baking Light Probes. Baking no longer relies on the Lightmapping delegates, where the user gets callbacks during the baking process. Instead, the process is very explicit and free of side effects, enabling the user to control how many probes to bake at a time to balance execution time vs memory usage. We expose a GPU backend focused on high performance and using OpenCL internally.
More enhancements to Adaptive Probe Volumes
Sky Occlusion enables you to apply a dynamic time of day lighting scenario to your virtual environments, achieving more color variations of static indirect lighting from the sky as compared to APV scenario blending.
We have also expanded APV scenario blending to URP, enabling a wider range of platform support for you to easily blend between baked probe volume data for day/night transitions or switching lights on and off in rooms.
HDRP dynamic worlds
To better enable time of day scenarios, we improved sky rendering in particular at sunset and sunrise adding ozone layer support and atmospheric scattering to complement the fog at long distance, as well as adding support for transparent surfaces with mixed tracing mode to mix raytraced and screen space effects when rendering surfaces like water together with terrains and vegetation.
Because performance is key when rendering large dynamic world, we also optimized SpeedTree vegetation rendering leveraging the new GPU Resident Drawer mentioned above, and water interactions adding an option to read back simulation from the GPU with a few frames of delay instead of replicating the simulation on the CPU.
Profiling and enhanced toolset for VFX Graph
In our mission to make it easier to use VFX Graph and to use it on a wider range of platforms, we improved tooling and URP support. If it was already possible to profile the cost of a VFX, the new VFX Graph profiling tools allows a VFX artist to find what could be optimized within a graph. One of the power of VFX Graph is to create uber reusable effects, and a key aspect is to build a nice dashboard to control it, which is now much more accessible with easier to create built-in and custom attributes with the blackboard (browse and create attributes from the dashboard with a quick description, drag and drop attributes from the blackboard in graph or blocks, attribute usage highlights in the graph,…). You can as well more easily build uber VFX shaders with the support of Shader Graph Keywords, and build more complex effects with URP with now access to URP depth and color buffers for fast collision or for spawning particles from the world.
Improved quality of life for Shader Graph
Shader Graph is used in most productions and we wanted to address some of the top user pains when using or learning the tool on a daily basis with improved shortcuts, a heatmap color mode to quickly identify the most GPU intensive nodes in your graphs, and faster Undo/Redo. And for both experts and beginners, because it is sometimes time consuming to understand what a node does and how to use it, we added a Node Reference Sample containing a set of Shader Graph assets where each graph is a description of one node, with breakdowns of how the math works under the hood, and examples of how the node can be used (you can learn more in this video).