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Unity Working On A New Unified OpenGL Rendering System

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Good news for those of us annoyed by the poor OpenGL performance of games built with Unity, as the Unity engine will have a unified OpenGL rendering system.

What the hell does that mean?
Currently Unity has OpenGL desktop which is stuck on OpenGL 2.1, OpenGL ES 2.0 and one for OpenGL ES 3.0. You can imagine how annoying that is.

The great news for us, is that with the new unified OpenGL system, games can scale from OpenGL ES 2 all the way up to OpenGL 4.5. So, not only will games in future Unity versions use a much more modern OpenGL, this is also a high point:
QuoteWe do not need to maintain separate diverging codebases, bugs need to only be fixed once and all optimizations we do benefit all the platforms simultaneously.


There's a lot of other work going on, as they are trying to get OpenGL to work more like DirectX 11. A lot of the blog post is very technical, but one fun thing is that some of the work they are using is based upon Icculus work with Mojoshader as their HLSL to GLSL shader language translator uses code from it.

This has me cautiously excited for Unity games built on Unity 5.1+, it would need to be at least Unity 5.1 as that's where this experimental OpenGL code for the desktop currently resides.

This is one of the good things about Android and iOS being so popular as they use a form of OpenGL (OpenGL ES), and we probably wouldn't be getting these improvements if mobile wasn't so popular.

See their blog post on it here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Unity
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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16 comments
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marcelomendes Jun 2, 2015
Good. Lets hope the tons of Early Access Unity based games upgrade to this new release. o_O
Shmerl Jun 2, 2015
Aren't they also involved in Vulkan development? If so, will Unity support Vulkan / SPIR-V as well?

UPDATE: I missed the comment about it above :)
edo Jun 2, 2015
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: edoThe problem is that my laptop supports until OpenGL 3.1 and directx 10 :/ So seems to be no Unity 5.1 for me.
I’m curious, what GPU do you have?
amd mobility radeon hd 4250
edo Jun 3, 2015
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: edoamd mobility radeon hd 4250
According to this page your GPU can do OpenGL 3.3. I just wanted to check that :).
Still not enough to run Unity 5.1 games, but you are right.
edo Jun 5, 2015
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: edoStill not enough to run Unity 5.1 games, but you are right.
I don’t think you need to worry as their blog post states the new renderer supports “all versions from 2.1 to 4.5”.
I thought the point of this was just to support one Opengl renderer for all the platforms, I guess I have to re-read it
dubigrasu Jun 21, 2015
Just a small info, Unturned recently upgraded their engine to 5.
Finally working for me this way, and running pretty good.
http://steamcommunity.com/games/304930/announcements/detail/237910886970970507
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