We've compiled five key features of the upcoming Unity 6 for CG artists, not developers, including the new GPU Resident Drawer system to accelerate rendering of complex scenes, new rendering scalability technologies, improvements in cloud and water rendering in HDRP, as well as new AI-powered artistic tools.

GPU Resident Drawer speeds up rendering of complex scenes
An important structural change in Unity 6 Preview is the GPU Resident Drawer - a "GPU-driven system behind the scenes" that accelerates rendering of scenes with a large number of instanced objects.

It is supported in HDRP and URP rendering pipelines, and the performance boost depends on the complexity of the scene, so "the more instanced objects you render, the more benefit you get." The new rendering path is specifically designed for static meshes, including vegetation created using SpeedTree technology in Unity, so it will not work with characters with skin, particles, or effects. There are also a number of technical limitations: details can be found in this forum post.

New Rendering Upscaling Technologies
Rendering performance is also enhanced by new upscaling technologies, allowing frames to be rendered at lower resolutions and then upscaled to the screen resolution.

These include Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP) - a new system that, according to Unity, generates higher-quality images than the existing TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) Upscaler. It is supported in both HDRP and URP and works on desktops, consoles, and mobile devices with compute support. For more detailed information, you can refer to the release notes. Additionally, HDRP now supports AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.1 upscaling system on Windows. It supports AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs under DirectX 11, 12, or Vulkan.

HDRP: Improved Sky, Cloud, and Water Rendering
HDRP, Unity's high-definition rendering pipeline for desktop and console games, has received a number of enhancements in Unity 6 Preview, particularly in the realm of environment rendering.

The Physically Based Sky system now includes an ozone layer as part of the atmospheric model, resulting in realistic color changes as the sun approaches the horizon, as shown above. Additionally, atmospheric perspective can now be enabled to simulate light absorption by particles in the atmosphere when viewing distant objects such as mountains or clouds. The water system has gained support for volumetric fog to render underwater light rays and other lighting effects, along with a new node in Shader Graph for sampling the camera's height relative to the water surface, which can be used to simulate water droplets on the camera lens.
Workflow improvements have also been made for rendering volumetric clouds and hair, and a new circular procedure for lens flares has been added, generating concentric circular flares. Furthermore, the contour tracer now supports Tube and Disc Area Lights as light sources, and the desaturation of volumetric fog occurs separately from additional computations.

Render Graph is now supported in URP
In URP (Universal Render Pipeline), Unity's pipeline for rendering, there have been some minor improvements. One of the key changes is that Render Graph, Unity's system for creating custom rendering pipelines, is now available in URP as well as in HDRP. Additionally, URP now supports horizontal extension rendering in the Forward+ rendering path, allowing for rendering quality reduction based on distance to the center of the screen or the viewer's focal point in a VR headset to improve rendering performance.

Muse Animate generates animated clips from textual cues
Furthermore, all generative AI tools from Unity's Muse are now officially available in the Unity Editor. Although this change is not mentioned in the release notes, Unity announced it less than two weeks ago, so Unity 6 Preview will be the first chance for many users to try out these tools.

Users now have access to the Animate text-to-animation system (shown above), which allows them to generate animated clips for humanoid characters from textual descriptions. The results can be edited by breaking down the clip into multiple poses, manually adjusting the position of the character's joints, and then prompting Animate to regenerate the animation accordingly.
As for lighting, Unity 6 Preview introduces further updates to Adaptive Probe Volumes - a system for automating the placement of light probes in Unity, including support for sky occlusion. The workflow in Shader Graph has also been improved, including a new heatmap color mode for debugging shader setups by identifying the most GPU-intensive nodes in the graph. The VFX Graph now has new profiling windows for debugging effect settings. Developer tools, UI tools, XR features, and platforms supported by Unity have also been updated, especially for online games: mobile browsers - both Android and iOS - are now supported in the Unity web platform, and experimental support for the new WebGPU API has been added.

Unity 6 Preview is also likely the first version of the software to be subject to the controversial new Unity runtime royalties. According to a blog post by Unity, the preview version is "best suited" for pre-production and prototyping, but if "any code, functionality, or fixes from any version of Unity 6 are included in a released game, a corresponding runtime royalty may apply." The runtime royalty will apply to games created with Unity 6 that have reached over one million installations and earned over one million dollars in gross revenue over the previous 12 months.
The Unity editor is compatible with Windows 10 and above, Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 Linux, and macOS 11.0 and above. The free Personal subscription can be used by anyone earning up to $100,000 per year. They have a splash screen and other restrictions listed in this comparison table. The Pro subscription costs $2,040 per year. Industry subscriptions, which add product visualization tools, cost $4,950 per year.