Unity has released its latest update, 2017.1, now including NVIDIA VRWorks. Specifically aimed at VR developers, Unity claims the update, ‘Brings a new level of visual fidelity, performance, and responsiveness to Virtual Reality’.
New VR Features:
- Multi-Res Shading is an innovative rendering technique for VR whereby each part of an image is rendered at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the lens corrected image.
- Lens Matched Shading uses the new Simultaneous Multi-Projection architecture of NVIDIA Pascal-based GPUs to provide substantial performance improvements in pixel shading.
- Single Pass Stereo uses the new Simultaneous Multi-Projection architecture of NVIDIA Pascal-based GPUs to draw geometry only once, then simultaneously project both right-eye and left-eye views of the geometry.
- VR SLI provides increased performance for virtual reality apps where two GPUs can be assigned a specific eye to dramatically accelerate stereo rendering.
In order to take advantage of these improvements, the playback should be experienced with a GeForce 9 series or higher GPU running on a PC.
VR Works for Unity is available now, free on the Asset Store.
Other Updates For Unity 2017.1
New Tools For Storytelling
- New ways to create cinematic content, compose artistic camera shots and tell better visual stories with the Timeline, Cinemachine and the Post-Processing Stack tools:
- Timeline allows you to create cinematic content such as cutscenes and trailers, gameplay sequences, and much more.
- Cinemachine is an advanced camera system that enables you to compose your shots like a movie director from within Unity, without any code, and ushers in the era of procedural cinematography.
- The Post-Processing Stack lets you easily apply realistic filters to scenes using film industry terminology, controls, and colour space formats to create high quality visuals.
Efficiency, Collaboration And Live-ops Analytics
- Unity Teams is a set of features and solutions that simplifies the way creators work together, which includes Collaborate (now out of beta) and Cloud Build.
- Live-ops Analytics introduces new, easier ways to understand your users and dynamically react and adjust your games without having to redeploy.
- Productivity updates to the Editor include improvements to FBX import, animation workflows, 2D functionality, working with assets bundles and Visual Studio integration.
Graphics And Platforms
- There are a number of advancements in the areas of Particle Systems and the Progressive Lightmapper, offering more options to achieve your artistic vision and control performance.
- Various platforms get rendering boost options with Deferred Rendering on iOS and NVIDIA VRWorks on PC.
You’ll find more information about the update here.
Unity 2017.1 is available now for all users with an active subscription plan (Personal, Plus and Pro) to download here.
