OpenGL Core is the new back-end capable of supporting the latest OpenGL features on Windows, MacOS X and Linux. This scales from OpenGL 3.2 to OpenGL 4.5 depending on the OpenGL driver support.
The new OpenGL Core is used by default on MacOSX and Linux.
As a new feature, the OS X Editor and Standalone now support the new OpenGL backend, which enables the use of OpenGL 3.x and 4.x features such as tessellation and geometry shaders.
However, as Apple restricts the OpenGL version on OS X desktop to 4.1 at most, it does not support all DirectX 11 features (such as Unordered Access Views or Compute Shaders). This means that all shaders that are configured to target Shader Level 5.0 (with #pragma target 50) will fail to load on OS X.
Therefore a new shader target level is introduced: #pragma target gl4.1. This target level requires at least OpenGL 4.1 or DirectX 11.0 Shader Level 5 on desktop, or OpenGL ES 3.1 + Android Extension Pack on mobiles.
The new OpenGL back-end introduces many new features (previously mostly DX11/GLES3 only):
When using the existing #pragma targets, they map to following GL levels:
For including and excluding shader platforms from using a specific shaders, the following #pragma only_renderers / exclude_renderers targets can be used:
It’s possible to start the editor or the player with OpenGL using the command line arguments:
OpenGL ES graphics API is available on Windows machines with Intel or NVIDIA GPUs with drivers supporting OpenGL ES.
Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
Thanks for rating this page!
What kind of problem would you like to report?
Is something described here not working as you expect it to? It might be a Known Issue. Please check with the Issue Tracker at issuetracker.unity3d.com.
Thanks for letting us know! This page has been marked for review based on your feedback.
If you have time, you can provide more information to help us fix the problem faster.
Provide more information
You've told us this page needs code samples. If you'd like to help us further, you could provide a code sample, or tell us about what kind of code sample you'd like to see:
You've told us there are code samples on this page which don't work. If you know how to fix it, or have something better we could use instead, please let us know:
You've told us there is information missing from this page. Please tell us more about what's missing:
You've told us there is incorrect information on this page. If you know what we should change to make it correct, please tell us:
You've told us this page has unclear or confusing information. Please tell us more about what you found unclear or confusing, or let us know how we could make it clearer:
You've told us there is a spelling or grammar error on this page. Please tell us what's wrong:
You've told us this page has a problem. Please tell us more about what's wrong:
Thanks for helping to make the Unity documentation better!