Confused on Steam Play and Proton? Be sure to check out our guide.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Unity 5.5 released, removes legacy OpenGL support

By - | Views: 13,911
Unity 5.5 has been released as a pretty major update to this popular game engine. One interesting bit for us is that games built with 5.5 onward will only have access to the modern OpenGL system.

I'm hoping they did a bug-fixing drive on their new OpenGL system, since any game that used the new system in previous builds of Unity had major rendering bugs, which forced you to set the game to use an OpenGL fallback.

Hopefully this will be another step towards OpenGL Unity games performing better.

There's plenty of other new features and bug fixes, here's a look at a glance:
- Native memory allocation profiling in CPU Profiler Timeline
- New modules for the particles system enabling new effects
- Added support for sending custom data to Particle System vertex Shaders
- Unity splash screen tools
- Added support for cubemap arrays
- Added support for BC4,BC5,BC6,BC7 compressed texture formats, and RGBAHalf format
- And tons more!

The Unity Editor 5.5 for Linux is also now available, find more info on that here. It is still not an official build yet.

See the release notes here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
1 Likes
About the author -
author picture
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.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
9 comments

edo Nov 30, 2016
Now its the turn of 5.6 beta with vulkan support.
lucinos Nov 30, 2016
They are removing OGL2. I do not think that this affects anyone. It is good because it reduces their maintenance. But I hope they will not remove OGL3 soon because that will affect some people.
soulsource Nov 30, 2016
Isn't KSP 1.2 using glcore? The game renders perfectly fine for me (AMD open source drivers).
Xpander Nov 30, 2016
the new glcore caused only rendering issues with steamoverlay enabled. hopefully thats fixed though
Lordpkappa Dec 1, 2016
We'll see an upgrade to the actual games that use Unity like Cities Skylines?
Beamboom Dec 1, 2016
How does removing legacy OpenGL support improve things for us, in practical terms? Isn't the legacy support a different library anyways, so performance on newer versions of OGL would be unaffected?

Or are they intervened in some fashion that to me sounds like a really bad design choice?

(I'm no Unity developer - just very very tempted to jump onboard that train)


Last edited by Beamboom on 1 December 2016 at 10:03 am UTC
Liam Dawe Dec 1, 2016
Quoting: BeamboomHow does removing legacy OpenGL support improve things for us, in practical terms? Isn't the legacy support a different library anyways, so performance on newer versions of OGL would be unaffected?

Or are they intervened in some fashion that to me sounds like a really bad design choice?

(I'm no Unity developer - just very very tempted to jump onboard that train)
Most games use the legacy OpenGL version Unity has, not many are actually using the newer OpenGL version.

It goes without saying that newer OpenGL allows for improved performance with the use of the newer bits available in it. That depends on what Unity does with it though and what developers do with their actual games too.
STiAT Dec 1, 2016
Quoting: LordpkappaWe'll see an upgrade to the actual games that use Unity like Cities Skylines?

They're pretty fast upgrading the eninge for their game. Two days ago (29th of November) they released on Unity 5.4 which was released on 10th of August, so it took them only close to two month. So I'd guess with the next bigger content they release we'll see Unity 5.5 support.
cRaZy-bisCuiT Dec 5, 2016
Quoting: STiAT
Quoting: LordpkappaWe'll see an upgrade to the actual games that use Unity like Cities Skylines?

They're pretty fast upgrading the eninge for their game. Two days ago (29th of November) they released on Unity 5.4 which was released on 10th of August, so it took them only close to two month. So I'd guess with the next bigger content they release we'll see Unity 5.5 support.
... which means we might see some Vulkan-Support for already existing games after it's been implemented in Unity? Great! (:
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.