Unity 5.3 Released With Big Renderer Improvements

Unity 5.3 was released today as the latest version of this popular, cross-platform game engine.

Unity 5.3 features new tools for developers, graphics optimizations, in-progress tvOS support, improved support for WebGL, better support for iOS 9, integrated in-app purchase support, VR improvements, and much more.

When it comes to the graphics rendering improvements, there's a brand new OpenGL 4 core. Commented for the release, "there’s a brand new OpenGL 4.x core, which will replace our legacy OpenGL 2.1 backend. This allows you to take advantage of the very latest OpenGL features on Windows, OS X and Linux, whilst also being able to scale to older versions of OpenGL, depending on the user’s OpenGL driver support. Note that in 5.3, Unity will default to the new OpenGL core, but you can switch to legacy OpenGL 2.1 manually to maintain previous behavior. Our current aim is to remove the legacy OpenGL backend in Unity 5.4."

Unity 5.3 also rolls into beta support for Screen Space Raytraced Reflections (SSRR). Additionally, Unity 5.3 rolls in official WebGL support.

More details on Unity 5.3 can be found via this Unity 3D blog post.