Unity offers a powerful alternative to Unreal Engine for artists, with some unique features and broader device support, including the Web. And while pricing caused some heated discussions a while back, the important thing to know is that students, personal users, and educators can all use Unity for free. So let’s check in with Unity, which has just branched into stable and latest-and-greatest branches with Unity 6.1. Here’s what’s new.
First, Unity will have both supported and LTS (long-term service) releases; the difference is that if you use the bleeding edge build, “supported” lasts only until the next release. 2025 should see both 6.1 and 6.2 releases, followed by the next LTS release later this year.
I don’t want to belabor the comparisons to Unreal, but I think it’s pretty clear where these fall. If you’re an artist using a game engine in your work and you don’t need to export to platforms, each has a free license. (Both are proprietary and fairly hefty tools; Godot is worth a look if you want something free, open source, and lightweight, which still has device support for both gaming and xR.)
The LTS approach is nice; that’s a little lacking on the Unreal side, honestly, which goes beta / kinda / next stable release, without a sense of real LTS releases and very often mixing experimental and stable features.
The other big difference on Unity is, you get a Linux editor, which Unreal lacks. (Unreal’s macOS support is much, much better than it used to be but also still catching up.)
I also like Unity’s approach to rendering and performance, especially in this release. Here’s what’ new:
Universal Render Pipeline deferred rendering for accelerating GPU performance with some new tricks for light culling, etc. And there are just a ton of URP improvements – see What’s new in URP.
Variable Rate Shading within URP/HDRP for enhanced performance – this reduces shader variants for stuff like fog and level of detail meshes, so you build faster and load faster, with less memory usage. You also will see less shader stuttering thanks to something called pipeline state object (PSO) tracing but – here’s why we use engines, so they take care of this stuff without us having to worry so much.
Improved lightmap performance with bicubic lightmap sampling.
Auto-generate Tilemap assets. (Yessss, 2D games!)
Project Auditor.
Build Automation.
Tons of new device support. This is what you pay for if you update beyond personal plans, but wow, you’re getting a lot – foldable and large screens on Android, Facebook and Messenger instant games, Android XR and Meta Quest support, and more.
Unity for Web. I believe this is available for personal users, and it’s another big reason to choose Unity over Unreal (though then you’ve got some nice JavaScript-based stuff as competition, too).
DirectX 12 support for enhanced CPU performance, PSO caching, and ray tracing. And it’s now the default. Plus you get a bunch of raytracing API improvements.
3D deformation for the water system. Let’s go surfing.
And a purity new water sample scene with caustics and deformation effects. Uh, yeah, if you’ve got the hard drive space and you’re using another tool, it’s still almost worth downloading this just to mess around in the water a while! Feature image, above/
Unity explained the changed build approach last week with a deep dive into features:
Unity 6.1, a Supported Update release, is now available
Or you can rewatch the presentation stream, if you’re, um, into that sort of thing. (Okay, sorry Unity, but while we’re comparing, Epic is doing a better job of these. From comments I can tell I’m not the only one who dislikes these kinds of videos generally.)
Me, I say, save time and RTFM here:
Then you can use your video-watching time for other stuff, like watching the next 3 Andor episodes on Wednesday. Ahem.
But if you do want video, the community are doing faster summaries, and here’s a nice hands-on:
Side note – the water system in Unity was already very cool. Oh. Deep dive. I get it:
Unity 7 (assuming that’s what it will be called) is the big one: merging pipelines back together and overhauling the entire engine. But an investment in Unity 6 will still pay off for a while, as this will be the long-term legacy release even when 7 comes out.
Using Unity in your work? Let us know in comments.