Official Update to the Unity Editor Software Terms

- we screwed up, big time, tell us how can we remedy the situation?
- develop awesome tech and make our life easier, working terrain, big world support, faster asset streaming
- here you go, we renamed our Unity 2023LTS to Unity 6 LTS (it's one bigger than Unreal has!) and here is a no one ever wanted AI package for $30 a month, so we good?

 

@EnumG In general you are right - an Engine will restrict you to some degree in exchange for drastically reducing your headache wehen it comes to low level stuff.
One example in the Unity context is the language border between C++ and C#.
That said, when you are talking about custom triangle implementations I believe you are going too far.
What environment allows you to do that more customized? For performance reasons a lot of that is hardwired inside GPUs or at least there are well established ways you practically are forced to do the software side so that the GPU is able to provide max performance.
One level higher than that, Unity already provides quite remarkable flexibility with its scriptable rendering pipeline. Just that in the end the average indie won't really need to go that deep anyways and won't have the resources to.

 

lol i didn't know that... i haven't use unity in a while xD they are going to charge for muse? xD i mean, is not bad but chatgpt is free and 4543 times better jaja

 

wait, it's an LTS rebrand of an existing version? I thought it was Unity 2024. I don't see any of the hype Whitehurst talked about in earnings call. No one's excited about AI tools and their own blog says they've used Stable Diffusion at least in some capacity, the same Stable Diffusion Steam bans outright.

 

wait, is it muse or the one that generates textures/images?

 

When your prepared keynote demo shows performance gains from 19fps to 44fps, it's not that impressive...

No idea, I think they're calling all of it Muse besides Sentis stuff, because that's Unity Sentis...

 

Unity, masters of coherent product branding strategies!

 

Lol, nothing can impress you, I suppose.

 

Seeing playable framerates for highly prepped demos would be nice.

 

Choosing to label it as a new major version is an elaborate way of hiding the fact that the latest LTS won't be on the same license agreement as the latest TECHs. Ignoring that part though it makes a ton of sense to abandon a year-based versioning scheme when you're not actually capable of hitting the target year it belongs to.

 

I agree. I felt underwhelmed by that as well. Going from 19 FPS to 44 FPS is not impressive enough. I realize that is it somewhat impressive to boost performance without requiring significant changes by the game developers, but it pales in comparison to other solutions that have been in the Unity engine for years.

For example, that same scene could be refactored using Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect and custom shaders to easily get over 100 FPS. I am guessing that serious game developers will continue to use GPU instancing in Unity 6, since GPU instancing will likely still offer the absolute best performance.

 

That's a performance improvement of 130%, and that's not impressive? And as said in the video, this is in editor, a build would have completely different framesrates.

 

Demos like these assume the best-case scenario and are typically run on the most powerful machine they can produce. So yes, unplayable framerate is still unplayable framerate even with 130% increase. If they said it's demonstrated on some run of the mill mid range laptop, then it might be somewhat impressive. But since we don't know anything about the machine, the framerate gain doesn't look that impressive when they can't push 60fps on a stylized, low poly demo.

It's also the only core tech thing they demonstrated, the rest of the keynote was yet again a slew of new services in beta or coming soon tm.

 

What is unplayable for you? I only had around 20-30 fps in some games on my old PC and had no problem with it. And if I suddenly had 60 fps with just a few settings, that would be great.
Parts of it are already in the 2023.3 alpha, so you can try it out yourself. GPU occlusion culling I believe is not in the last available alpha yet.

Isn't that the point of the keynotes to show something new? There is only a limited time here.

 

Welcome to the year 2023, where even mobile phones and handhelds like Steam Deck have 90-120hz screens and 60fps gaming is standard. Personally, I can't play anything sub 50fps. They demonstrated significant performance gain for something no game developer targets. Cognitively, I get that it's a significant improvement, but this is supposed to hype people up. I just can't get excited by 44fps peak performance in a demo for which they presumably had unlimited prep time and the best machines in the world to run on.

Yes, that's the point, but the keynote was predominantly about services and not engine technology. Like Unity Cloud (loved the crowd's toned down reaction) and other services like Muse AI. Basically, a presentation on microtransactions, and new ways to tie us to their ecosystem so some of us can't leave.

 

We need to assume Unity had access to fast, modern PC hardware. We should not assume they chose a tired old entry level PC to show off their performance gains.

Since time is limited in these presentations, we should also assume Unity chose to show off their best improvements. Honestly, 44 FPS on modern hardware is not amazing.

Any serious game developer will continue to use GPU Instancing to deliver maximum performance.

 

It's undoubtedly a cherry picked sample made to show it off as best as possible, but I have to say the part I loved the most was when they discussed decreasing vertices only for the frame rate not to improve at all once the rock was in front of the camera. If anything it went down (44 FPS with the rock and 45 FPS without it).

E: Oh, I paused the video to make this post and I missed the upscaler. I had to watch it a few times but I think they were demoing it by itself and not in conjunction with the other two features which if that's the case the final result should be higher than they showed. A similar percentage increase (76%) would mean 77 FPS (up from 44 FPS).

 

The fact they said "available consumer hardware" or whatever without giving direct specs means it was absolutely running top of the line stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a 4090 in there.

 

Yeah, if I have to guess, I say they had a Ryzen 9 7950x with 4th gen SSD, Nvidia 4090 and 64Gb memory. It's $4k-$5k (I didn't check it in the last 6-8 months), but "commercially available" (this is basically my developer machine).

 

I wouldn't be surprised if they skimped on the CPU and memory a bit, considering how they were very much interested in showing off just how much they were moving to the GPU, but yeah.

 

If you assemble it yourself a custom build with a 13900K, 64GB DDR5, and RTX 4090 is around $3.6K. It's just wild seeing an Intel build be cheaper ($100 less for CPU and $100 less for an enthusiast motherboard) than AMD.

Spoiler: Full Config

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K 3 GHz 24-Core Processor ($546.99 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12A chromax.black 60.09 CFM CPU Cooler ($129.94 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE AX ATX LGA1700 Motherboard ($239.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6400 CL32 Memory ($209.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($249.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Gigabyte GAMING OC GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card ($1999.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair RMe (2023) 1200 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($159.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $3536.88
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-11-17 15:44 EST-0500

 

44fps at 4K in editor. In a production build you can easily achieve frame rates that are 2 to 3 times higher than in the editor. Unfortunately, you can't see whether the editor is running in release mode or debug mode or whether safety checks are deactivated.

 

Builds are faster than editor. I don't know about assuming a 2-3x boost for builds, though. It depends on a lot of factors.

44 FPS on a high end development machine is underwhelming.

 

We basically don't know anything about the demo aside from what they've shown us. In fact if you didn't notice the Inspector was blank while he was manipulating that windmill. There was a very brief period he had a simple object selected but aside from that he kept it empty only showing the render debugger.

 

I agree. The only time I would ever use the quote "available consumer hardware" is when I am testing on a high end development machine. If I say "available consumer hardware", it means RTX 4090, 64GB RAM, NVMe SSD, and an Intel i9-13900K or AMD Ryzen 9 7950x. If it was anything else, I would always list the actual specs.

 

You can see in the video that the rendering in the game view is set to 4K UHD.
And the inspector wasn't blank while he was manipulating that windmill, you could see it in the screen capture, and before you can't see the entire upper half of the editor on the stage screen from that camera angle, and therefore not the inspector either.

 

Right, that's basically nothing. At most you might be able to infer how confident they felt when showcasing STP as upscalers benefit tremendously from high internal resolutions. A 4K output with a 65% scale is 1440p which is the most ideal resolution for high quality upscaling.

A 1080p output would have been a much better representation of the capabilities of the upscaler, but that would have been an internal resolution of less than 720p and the artifacts associated with upscaling would have been visible even at that small size on screen.

Once again they're cherry picking for their examples. It's cool tech but you shouldn't draw conclusions from it.

 

Are gamers really using upscalers on 1080p monitors?
If not (what I believe), that does not make a lot of sense to showcase in my opinion. If it is (or would be) bad at that low resolution, the demo would be less representative of the actual usecase...

 

Yes, and on 720p portable devices like the Steam Deck and Switch. For example Tears of the Kingdom uses FSR and it's very visible.

Spoiler: Digital Foundry - Tears of the Kingdom - Start at 7:30

4K is almost entirely console territory with desktop having less than 3%. More than 80% of gamers are on 1080p and 1440p.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

You simply can't get a more cherry picked example than what they gave: a very high resolution, percentage equal to the highest preset of other upscalers, and outputting to a subset of the screen which requires downsampling to fit further hiding artifacts. I'd be much less suspicious with fullscreen 1440p at the same percentage.

I'm still happy that they're finally releasing an upscaler for both pipelines and all devices though so don't confuse my suspicions with a lack of interest. It's been something we've needed in URP a while now. Maybe I'll even get to use it in my remaining contracts.

 

And the entire reason 4K is console territory is entirely because of the absolutely baffling push that TV manufacturers made towards making 4K a "thing." Here's what happens if you go to Best Buy here and sort TVs by resolution:

They have nearly as many 8K displays as they do 1080p ones.

 

The reality is 4K has become cheap enough that, for TVs, it doesn't make sense to even bother with 1080p for anything larger then around 30". Monitors tend not to get as big as TVs, because you're usually seated closer, so there's no need. As close as you are seated, 4k doesn't add much.

It's really not baffling, so much as a function of TVs being so much larger then most displays intended for monitor use.

 

That is nonsensical. The laptop's screen I use takes a bigger percentage of my view than the big TV that is a few meters away.

 

Edit: Wait, we're in this thread? Way off topic.

 

Yes, that's the entire point. Because it's close to your face you don't need a large screen to take up more of your vision.

 

No, the entire point is pixel density per visible area.

 

I am going to research how to turn my assets into non-engine rely on or to other engines after Runtime Fee. Yeah, it may be good for me and my game, which alert me don't put every egg into a basket.