Unity game engine 5.4 beta is out, developers working on performance

It's really good to see Unity working on improving performance, and the Unity 5.4 beta looks like it includes some pretty nice features to give improved performance.

The first key performance feature is more multi-threaded rendering:

QuoteBuilding on the work we did to take particles, sprites, flares, halos, lines and trails off the main thread in Unity 5.3, we’ve introduced parallel command list generation. Instead of building one graphics command list on the same CPU core scripts, physics and other systems are using, it moves the work to multiple CPU cores, removing some potential bottlenecks and enabling many complex scenes to run faster.

They have also worked on how many draw calls they do:

QuoteFewer draw calls means better performance, and, by gradually rolling out GPU instancing support, we’re allowing you to render vast numbers of identical geometries that share the same materials with very few draw calls. Initially GPU instancing support is available for Windows PC builds with DX11 and Shader Model 4.0 and OS X with OpenGL 4.1 and up. More platforms are in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

Let's hope the open source drivers get boosted up to OpenGL4.1+ by the time more games use this eh?

Overall Unity 5.4 is shaping up to be a pretty noteworthy release, and those are just some highlights I've cherry picked from their blog post.

You can see their full changelog here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.