Hi there! I don’t believe I’ve ever used the Unity forums. I mainly keep to myself on these matters, but I’m curious to get some opinions.
I first started using Unity around the end of Unity 5, and even today, I still find it the best version for me. I’ve tried Unity 2017-2019, but I’ve found them really problematic. Just recently, I tried to return to 2018, but it kept freezing, followed by crashing. These new releases seem so slow and much more prone to crash. While I don’t follow the development of the engine, I feel that newer releases seem to focus more on features, rather than fixes and stability. I haven’t tried Unity 4 and below, but I’ve heard they’re pretty good.
I’d like to know you’re thoughts. Which version do you find the best?; What’s the most stable and usable version (for general video-game use) to you?
The title asks about “most efficient”. If you want high efficiency, then look at 2019.4 or 2020.1 with a purely DOTS style project. This is especially true if you are asking about efficiency with regards to lots of units in the scene.
If you are asking about stability, I personally have seen great stability with both 2018.4 and 2019.4.
While PC hardware improved over the last years, it feels like Unity got much worse performance-wise.
Compiled builds are slower, the editor is slower, and it makes no difference for most editor actions if projects are stored on a HDD, SSD or even a ramdisk.
Almost everything is unresponsive, singlethreaded and results in a bad user experience for developers. At least thats my feeling after working with this engine for almost 8 years now.
Yet I’d say the latest (stable, sometimes beta) version is always the best for me. While newer editor versions are usually slower than older ones, I absolutely can’t complain about crashes or horrendous bugs in beta versions, at least on Windows. (The Linux editor is a whole different story though)
New features are more important to me than pure performance. Just take URP + Shader Graph + VFX Graph for example: extremely powerful tools which are easy to use, making it a lot easier (and faster) to create shaders and performant particle effects. This time might be better saved on another end, but thats just how things are at the moment sadly.
And if anyone here is playing with the idea now to start using Unity 4 (or even Unity 3) today for better performance: just don’t.
Besides the problem that almost anything was locked behind a 1500$ paywall (pro version) back then, those versions are totally outdated, unsupported and lack so many features that you don’t want to throw a build made with them at your current (or future) userbase - except you really hate them of course.
Was going to say, user experience regarding performance and stability is highly dependent on project.Pretty mmuch no point just collecting random opinions on that without significant data to support. Time better served testing yourself IMO.
I say use LTS that has feature set you need. Try to get a stress test of your project done ASAP.
Unity 2018.2.21. The last version which has the old prefab workflow. The newer prefab workflow is better in some respects, but it often slows down the process.
Your mileage may vary but I have to echo your results with 2018.4 freezing - it is a major pain and bug reported for Windows, 2017 was fine (but skip pre-2018 nested prefab change).
Trying 2019.4 for a new project and hoping more stable
Well still trying to find a version after 2017 that stops locking up into a ‘not responding state’ in windows! 2019.4 does it on closing for me and it’s a small new project test
It doesn’t really matter, since to comply with platform requirements, you need to be on recent versions of Unity. So either 2018LTS or 2019LTS. Either is fine.
Hope you don’t mind me digging up this old thread. Just wanted to say that I ended up sticking with Unity 5.6. I really enjoy working with Unity 5, and these newer versions are such a hassle. (I honestly don’t see myself upgrading, and if I was ever forced to, I’d probably just move to a different engine.) Thanks to all of you for giving your recommendations though!
What ive done is use a stable LTS version thats been “worked out”, which is usually a year out. Meaning, if current year is 2020, ill use 2019 LTS, as it has been supported more/bugs worked out, more than a newer version. I Iike to stay a year behind for that reason.