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Unity 5.6 to release March 31st with 'out of the box support for Vulkan'

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More news from GDC, Unity have announced that on March 31st, Unity 5.6 will release and it will have 'out of the box support for Vulkan'.

This is good news for us, since future Unity games will hopefully go with Vulkan instead of OpenGL for increased performance in the Linux versions of games built with it. Not only that, but developers who upgrade their Unity version could hopefully ship a Linux (and Windows) build using Vulkan. A crazy amount of developers use Unity, so it's going to be pretty good for Vulkan and Linux gaming.

You can see their entire talk below, skip to 35:25 to hear about Vulkan:
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You can see the full blog post from Unity here.

Also, on Thursday ARM will be doing a Vulkan + Unity talk at GDC, so that might be quite interesting to watch. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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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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8 comments

Kimyrielle Feb 28, 2017
That's fantastic news! \o/
"Not only that, but developers who upgrade their Unity version could hopefully ship a Linux (and Windows) build using Vulkan."

Feels like most developers that use unity cite that they will inevitably run into problems when upgrading that requires quite a bit of play testing to flush them out. Additionally once flushed out they have to either undo workarounds applied for the previous version, or make entirely new ones for the new one, that makes the process difficult. So for completed games I wouldn't count on it too much from small developers.

It would be nice if one day game engine upgrades could be drop in replacements but there must be way too much happening under the hood for it to happen in the present.


Last edited by Madeanaccounttocomment on 28 February 2017 at 10:37 pm UTC
Shmerl Feb 28, 2017
Good, hopefully more games will use Vulkan out of the box now.
Purple Library Guy Mar 1, 2017
I went to 35:25 and I didn't hear anything about Vulkan.
Beamboom Mar 1, 2017
Strange, I've had the Unity editor v5.6 installed quite a while already, at least for a month or so? Could it be that the Linux version is ahead of Windows?
pablokl Mar 1, 2017
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI went to 35:25 and I didn't hear anything about Vulkan.

Jump to 21:30
niarbeht Mar 1, 2017
Here's hoping that maybe Kerbal Space Program eventually gets Vulkan support. Probably won't help in any noticeable way on high part-count vehicles, though.
Purple Library Guy Mar 1, 2017
Quoting: pablokl
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI went to 35:25 and I didn't hear anything about Vulkan.

Jump to 21:30
Ah, thanks!
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