Beta releases are published for Tech Stream 1 and 2 a few months prior to the intended release. These beta versions give you early access to our intended features, so you can battle-test them against your own projects and share your feedback to help us make the products better. 

This is an opportunity to help us shape future Unity versions, since APIs and feature definitions may not be complete. If you find something that doesn’t work in the real world, let us know. Find out more about our beta program here.

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2021.2 beta sweepstakes winners

To celebrate the NVIDIA DLSS integration into Unity 2021.2, we’re thrilled to announce the lucky winners soon of our Unity 2021.2 beta sweepstakes, sponsored by NVIDIA! Two users each win an NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3090 graphics card and an exclusive Unity x LEGO minifigure. Check the forums for winner details.

The first Unity title to commercially release with NVIDIA RTX and DLSS enabled was LEGO Builder’s Journey by Light Brick Studio. See more about their integration here.

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Tech Streams are released twice in the yearly cadence – once around 12 months before our intended final, production-ready release, and again six months later. Tech Stream releases give you access to the latest in-progress features, so you can explore new capabilities for your project and pressure-test components as we continue to stabilize them. Each Tech Stream release is fully supported until the next Tech Stream release comes along.

The second Tech Stream release of the year, launching today, is particularly significant because it represents the final functionality changes we’ll make in the product this year. Between now and the LTS release, we will focus exclusively on stability, polishing performance, ensuring productivity, and improving the quality of our tools wherever we can. You can use functionality we introduce in Tech Stream 2 going forward with no major API changes or features being added or removed. 

Finally, after the next six months of testing, we release the LTS version. Having an additional half-year of attention from our engineering teams, this release rolls up mature builds of the features and improvements made over the previous 12 months into a single installation with two years of support. If you’re on an older version but not ready for a Tech Stream release, you might want to take a look at the current LTS and the enhanced features you could leverage.

Source: Unity Technologies Blog