I’m trying to decide which shader editor to use so I’ve been reading about the different options. Seems like Shader Forge is no longer supported, leaving Amplify Shader Editor and Shader Graph in the table.
Most of the info I found was from mid 2018. At that time most people agreed that Shader Graph was very new and didn’t have nearly as many features as Amplify and lacked support for different types of shaders.
How far has Shader Graph come? Has it caught up with Amplify?
Or is Amplify still way better?
The answer to both of these questions is “the default rendering pipeline built into Unity”. Shader Graph has no support for it and most likely will never have support for it as the default pipeline is now officially in maintenance mode and won’t receive any new features.
The default pipeline, which is what you currently get if you select a new 2D or 3D project, or what you’re likely using if you’ve had a project in development for a while.
Is there any disadvantage to not being able to use the default pipeline?
Do you know if Amplify supports the latest version of LWRP (v6.9.1 I think, which is the only downloadable version in Unity 2019.2)?
I read here that there is support for LWRP v5.13.0 (the only downloadable version in Unity 2019.1).
I’d have thought the answer to this would be obvious. If you have an existing project that needs to have a new shader then the disadvantage is you wouldn’t be able to use Shader Graph for that project. For completely new projects I can’t think of any reason why you would use the default pipeline. Like I said it’s basically in maintenance mode. No new features.
It looks like it’s not been updated yet, but sadly, this doesn’t surprise me a lot. The SRP documentation in general is pretty lacking. When I decided to start testing 2019.2 after 2018.x, I found the near entire SRP API had been changed with no documentation of those changes anywhere
Disadvantage of using HDRP is more than 22ms per frame in odyssey samsung + on empty scene without post effects! While no more than 10ms acceptable for VR.
Virtual reality on standalone platforms requires a powerful machine. You need a high resolution and a high refresh rate to have a good experience. Getting just one of those is trivial for most modest gaming machines on the market but getting both of them generally requires the best hardware on the market.
HDRP was primarily designed for consoles and standalone platforms. Everything else, including a very niche market like virtual reality, is very much secondary. If you need more performance but you’ve reached the limits you can optimize and simply can’t raise system requirements you need to choose a difference rendering pipeline.
never seen any direct comparison of where amplify shaders and the new built in shader graph to see where they both stand… would be interested to know, personally I’ve preferred amplify for its design and style and just know it a bit more than the new shader graph as it has been around for longer… also just using the standard renderer so amplify works for that aswel…
The new urp and hdrp just isn’t that well supported by any addons… or if it is, its definitely not all the addons you might want to use, it’s a complete trainwreck of wasted time waiting on unitypackage imports and finding shit ain’t working… the sooner unity get on with providing features for the asset store to use the new package manager system where third party addon devs can specify which hdrp/urp package versions they are compatible with the better… the 2020 package manager for the asset store is also a bit shit still.
For the solo developer who relies on a lot of 3rd party support I’ve found this to be the case as well. Spend too much time trying to make things compliant if you choose new render pipelines. And I don’t see the benefit – the old one works fine and can make nice looking games.
I don’t know enough to argue about the under-the-hood stuff of amplify versus shader graph. But amplify is older, has way more doc/instructions, and is market verified.
