Godot 4.4 Dev 1 Brings Renderer Improvements, Betsy Texture Compression

The Godot open-source, cross-platform game engine continues advancing wonderfully as an alternative to the more well established but proprietary and commercial-focused game engines. Godot 4.4 Dev 1 released today as the first tagged development snapshot toward the next version of this great game engine.

Godot 4.4 Dev 1 incorporates the early pull requests for the next iteration of this game engine. Godot 4.4 Dev 1 features 3D physics interpolation that builds upon the 2D nodes physics interpolation in Godot 4.3, lightmap bicubic sampling, Betsy GPU texture compression for better performance, and a variety of other performance optimizations. A lot of work especially has landed already for the Godot renderer. For those using Apple platforms, there is also an initial Metal rendering back-end as an alternative to Godot's Vulkan / Direct3D 12 / OpenGL support. The Metal rendering back-end currently just works for Metal on Apple Silicon hardware.

Godot 4.3 only released recently while Godot 4.4 is off to a great start. For downloads or to learn more about this early stage Godot 4.4 development release can learn more via GodotEngine.org.