Vulkan provides 60% perf improvement in Unity Engine

Unity has announced that the beta version of their new Unity Engine has support for the fresh Vulkan API, something that starts with Unity 5.6 beta - allowing Personal Edition users to even jump in and use Vulkan.

Vulkan is allowing rendering performance leaps of up to 60% out of the box, without having to dive into the deep ocean that is the Vulkan API. Unity adds: "Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs on desktop and mobile platforms. It's designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores by allowing multiple threads to run in parallel. This means increased speed with reduced driver overhead and CPU workload, leaving the CPU free to do additional computation or rendering".

Unity 5.6 beta also includes improvements to graphics, with Metal Compute, Particle System, and GPU Instancing all receiving some developer love. Unity also has future plans to add in new features into the next beta, something that will include a new Progressive Lightmapper for baked lightmaps that will provide fast iterations and predictable ETA.

The team adds: "Light modes are replacing mixed mode lighting, providing flexible and efficient ways to merge baked and realtime shadows. This come with the ability to bake shadowmasks, providing seamless "past realtime shadow distance" shadows. The result will be a high reduction in realtime shadow distance for increased performance. Realtime shadow fade out has been added for every light type and rendering path".