Unity Engine adds Vulkan support, promises 60 percent performance boost

Unity announced the availability of version 5.6 beta of its video game engine. One of the biggest new features is the addition of support for the Vulkan API. So far we haven't seen a lot of benefit from new APIs as the performance gains can't be unlocked without a major rewrite of the game code, which developers aren't willing to do yet, but Unity claims they've seen "out-of-the-box" rendering performance improvements of up to 60 percent without dealing with any specifics of the Vulkan API:

Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs on desktop and mobile platforms. 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.

More details about the graphical improvements in Unity 5.6 can be read over here.