Introduction to Unity Accelerator

Unity Accelerator speeds up your team’s workflow by caching imported assets, compiled shaders, and the output of texture compressionA method of storing data that reduces the amount of storage space it requires. See Texture Compression, Animation Compression, Audio Compression, Build Compression.
See in Glossary so that this work isn’t repeated on every machine. When a team member imports an asset or compiles a shaderA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary variant, the result is stored in Unity Accelerator’s cache and made available to everyone else on the team, reducing import and build times.

You can install Unity Accelerator on a machine in your local network or on a remote server. If you work on a team in the same building, installing Unity Accelerator on a dedicated machine on a local area network provides the fastest cache access because it has minimal network latency. For distributed or remote teams, hosting Unity Accelerator on a cloud or remote server means that all team members can use shared caching regardless of their physical location.

Solo developers can also install Unity Accelerator and get the benefit of faster build times and Unity Editor startup times if you’re reusing assets across projects or performing clean builds of your projects.

Install Unity Accelerator

To install Unity Accelerator, you can either install it with the installer or with Docker Hub. Make sure that the system you install it on meets the minimum requirements.

After installation, you can verify the Unity Accelerator version and configure Unity Accelerator in the Editor.

Use Unity Accelerator

After you have installed Unity Accelerator on your network and set it up in your project, it works in the background, caching your assets. You can monitor its usage via the dashboard at http://<accelerator-host-ip>/dashboard. You can further configure it per-project through the Project Settings window, or globally through the Preferences window.

Cache types

The Unity Accelerator cache server supports the following types of caching. Each type has different characteristics that determine what it caches, its determinism, and what performance benefits it provides:

• Import result caching: Stores the output artifacts of the import process that together form the import result. Unity stores each artifact separately to aid in reuse across imports. This caching behavior can significantly reduce import times.
• Shader variant compilation caching: Stores compiled shader code for specific platform and keyword combinations together.
• Texture compression3D Graphics hardware requires Textures to be compressed in specialized formats which are optimized for fast Texture sampling. More info
  See in Glossary caching: Stores the output of the compression stage of the texture import process.

For more information, refer to Unity Accelerator caching types.

Additional resources

• Unity Accelerator requirements
• Importing Assets
• The Asset Database