Deferred Renderer
On modern hardware your games can use a new state-of-the-art deferred rendering pipeline. This means tons of dynamic lighting – making even your browser games look like state-of-the-art AAA console games.
100 Built-in shaders
Unity comes with 100 shaders ranging from the simplest (Diffuse, Glossy, etc.) to the very advanced (Self Illuminated Bumped Specular, etc.).
Scalability
When using advanced shader effects you want to make sure your game runs well across all your target hardware. Unity's shader system makes extensive use of fallbacks so you can make sure that everyone gets the best possible experience, and Unity also supports graphics card emulation to simplify testing.
Full Screen Post-Processing Effects
Unity has tons of full-screen image postprocessing effects built in: Sun shafts, high quality depth-of-field, lens effects, chromatic abberation, curve-driven color correction and lots more.
Surface Shaders
With Unity 3, we're introducing Surface Shaders, a new simplified way to author shaders for multiple devices and rendering paths. Write a simple Cg program and Unity cross-compiles it for forward & deferred rendering, makes it work with lightmaps, and even automatically converts it to GLSL for mobile devices.
This means that you can focus on getting the look right and we'll make sure it scales – all the way down to using spherical harmonics and fixed-function lighting on low-end hardware.
If you want custom lighting models that's easy too: simply implement the lighting equation inside a function and Unity does the rest – across all rendering methods.
Performance
Batching
In order to minimize draw calls, Unity will automatically combine your geometry into batches. This significantly minimizes driver overhead while retaining full flexibility.
Unity Pro additionally combines static objects together at build-time to ensure maximum geometry throughput.
Rewritten Rendering Engine
For Unity 3 we rewrote the entire rendering backend to be more flexible and powerful than ever before. This means that rendering is broadly 50% faster than before – as well as providing vastly more flexibility.
Occlusion Culling
Together with Umbra Software – used in many AAA games – Unity developed a completely new Precomputed Visibility Solution, only available in Unity. This works on mobile, web and consoles with minimal runtime overhead, while reducing the number of rendered objects to only what is necessary. Best of all: instead of a 5-digit per-game price, this is included in your Unity Pro license at no extra charge.
GLSL Optimizer
OpenGL ES finally allows for use of full shaders on mobile devices. Sadly, many graphics drivers still leave a lot to be desired. That's why we went the extra mile and developed our own optimizer for GLSL shaders, yielding a 2-3x fillrate increase.
LOD Support
As your scenes get larger, performance becomes a bigger consideration. One of the ways to manage this is to have meshes with different levels of detail depending on how far the camera is from the object. Unity's built-in level-of-detail support, using LODGroups, makes managing this simple.