Unity said on Tuesday it has officially released Unity 6.6, improving development work, content management and graphics performance.

Unity 6.6 is the last non-long-term support release to be introduced ahead of Unity 6.7 Long Term Support (LTS), which is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of this year. It applies key components of a new coreCLR that will be used as the foundation for next-generation Unity 7.

All new projects will default to Fast Enter Play Mode, which reloads the scene but does not reload the domain. Unity plans to provide developers with a transition period before removing the existing domain reload method in Unity 7.

It also revamped its content management features. It will provide Content Directory for local content, which can replace existing asset bundles. It integrates with existing Addressables settings and can reduce build and loading times and memory usage.

The Build Analyzer window lets users review build history, large assets and dependency structures. It also offers features to identify the causes of build failures and compare changes across different builds. A new Hierarchy window improves performance in large scenes and enhances column arrangement features.

In 2D, it added 2D Lights that support rendering layers and a graphics processing unit (GPU) skinning-based shadow generation feature. Through profiler modules for 2D animation, tilemaps and 2D graphics, users can also check the cost of rendering as well as lighting and shadow processing.

For graphics work, it introduced Unity Compute Light Baker, which uses hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Shader build settings support DXC for DirectX 12 and Shader Model 6. Unity said the clean build time of Survival Kids using this was reduced to about 1 hour and 46 minutes from 32 minutes.

In the user interface (UI) segment, a Safe Area component that reflects a device's display cutout and gesture areas has been added to Unity's graphical user interface (uGUI). The UI Toolkit has been improved to implement frosted-glass and screen overlay effects without a separate custom shader.

It also expanded supported platforms. With WebGPU in the official service stage, users can use compute shaders, GPU skinning, indirect rendering and the visual effect graph in a browser. On the web, it offers progressive asset loading that splits and loads assets by scene, and WebAssembly64 supporting up to 16 GB of memory.

In extended reality (XR), it added Adaptive Performance for Meta Quest that adjusts performance based on device heat and power status, OpenXR hand-tracking extensions, and spatial audio support. On Windows and Xbox Series X and S, it linked Content Directory with DirectStorage to increase read speeds by up to 40 percent.

Unity also introduced a signing feature for .unitypackage files. Developers can verify the identity of the organization distributing a package and detect whether a file has been tampered with.