Unity Engine Adds Vulkan API Support

Unity has released the latest version of its game engine, which supports the Vulkan API for improved graphical performance. Unity 5.6 Beta also includes a new video player and support for Google’s DayDream VR headset and Facebook Gameroom platform.

“Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs on desktop and mobile platforms,” Unity says in a blog post. “It’s designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores by allowing multiple threads to run in parallel. This means increased speed with reduced driver overhead and CPU workload, leaving the CPU free to do additional computation or rendering. In total, we’ve seen a rendering performance improvement out-of-the box up to 60% using Unity – that is without having to deal with any specifics of the Vulkan API.”

“The 5.6 beta also includes a lot of improvements for overall graphics, including the Particle System and GPU Instancing,” the blog adds. “The new DrawMeshInstancedIndirect function allows you to draw many instances of the same mesh using an instanced shader with arguments supplied from a ComputeBuffer. This new way of rendering instances via script has almost no CPU overhead.”

The beta release of Unity 5.6 is available to all Unity users, including the Personal Edition version of the engine.