The open source data-driven, Rust language powered game engine (framework) Bevy just released Bevy 0.17. This release comes nearly half a year after the April 2025 Bevy 0.16 release. This release adds some exciting new eye candy including a brand new raytracer, DLSS support and more. At the heart though many of the new features are paving the way for the upcoming Bevy Editor, such as the new Feathers UI layer.
Highlight features of Bevy 0.17 include:
- Bevy Solari – Raytraced Lighting (Experimental): Bevy now has work-in-progress support for stunning, physically realistic real-time lighting. Many limitations apply, but boy is it pretty.
- Improved Observers / Events: Observers have been wildly popular, offering users a flexible way to respond to events with very little boilerplate. We’ve cleaned up the Observer and Event APIs, made them even more flexible, and improved their documentation!
- Headless Bevy UI Widgets (Experimental): A new work-in-progress headless UI widget library, providing baseline widget functionality to build on top of.
- Bevy Feathers – Widgets for Tooling (Experimental): An opinionated set of tooling-focused widgets built on top of our headless widgets. We’re still building this out, but you can play with it right now!
- Rust Hotpatching: Tired of waiting for Rust to recompile while prototyping? Bevy now has an initial integration of
subsecondby Dioxus, allowing you to opt into hotreloaded Rust code without restarting your program. This is currently limited to Bevy ECS systems, and has some limitations. - Light Textures: You can now use textures to artistically modulate the intensity of light.
- DLSS: On Nvidia RTX GPUs, Bevy now supports Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for anti-aliasing and upscaling.
- Tilemap Chunk Rendering: A new performant way to render tilemaps in chunks … this is our first step in building out Bevy’s built-in tilemap system.
- Web Assets: Bevy’s asset system now supports loading assets from
httpandhttpsURLs. - Reflect Auto-Registration: When reflecting types, you no longer need to manually register them in your apps.
- Frame Time Graphs: A new built-in widget to debug frame times in running Bevy apps.
- UI Gradients: Bevy UI now supports background and border gradients.
- Raymarched Atmosphere: Bevy’s procedural atmosphere now has a raymarching mode for more accurate lighting.
- Virtual Geometry BVH Culling: Bevy’s virtual geometry system is now much faster thanks to BVH culling.
Key Links
Best of Synty Assets Humble Bundle
You can learn more about the new Bevy 0.17 release and see the new raytracing, DLSS and Feathers UI in action in the video below.