Hello, tell me in what way it is better to implement a lot of health bars when switching from embedded rendering to URP. I can have up to 300 characters in my game at the same time. In order to reduce the number of Draw Calls, I used the material property block (and in some places, as there are materials that differ only in color, but there are quite a lot of them). But there is no support for material property block in URP , how to implement such a thing (a lot of health bars) in URP? Or stay on embedded rendering?
Thank you in advance.
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Material Property Block will work in URP, but it will not take the fast SRP batcher path. It should work the same as in built-in renderer.
While not quite the same, you can create a material per character instead, which will allow them to go via the SRP batcher fast path. But I do understand that this can be a hassle to manage if it’s only e.g. a color that is different.
Well, for example, I have 200 characters, they have a material that is identical, except for the color. Is it preferable to use the URP feature, which should optimize shaders since only the color is different and there will be a large number of Draw Calls (I’m doing a project including for mobile platforms), or is it better to break the SRP batcher and use the Material Property Block?
In URP it’s okay to have a lot of materials since they batch by shader. The old standard pipeline worked the exact opposite, thus the outdated need for material property blocks.
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What justin_sunblink said 
You should get better performance with the SRP batcher + many materials approach. This also allows the constant buffer memory to be allocated persistently per material, so it should only get re-uploaded to the GPU when you change values in the material.
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So what is the best way to approach this in URP 2022 using Shader Graph?
I have about 300 car in the city, and each have 4 unique color properties.
I wouldn’t want to create 300^4 amount of materials on editor.
If batching is per-shader, does that mean I can just modify the material value through script on runtime (Creating a new unique instanced material), and then have it automatically be batched at best performance?
You can instantiate copies of a base material in Start and use those… the lack of a lightweight property override system per object has really been a problem for me in URP for years.
If your cars all have the same shader + geometry + textures (or a reasonably small set) you can look into gpu instancing if you just need multiple color properties (in a best case scenario this might be even faster than srp batching).
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Hi, just for clarificaiton, if I understand this right, its alright to create unique instanced material at runtime because it will still be batched with the SRP batcher as long as they’re the same shader?
I want to say yes, but obviously there is a bit of memory cost associated with the additional materials but I guess it is really not that much. The SRP batcher certainly makes this approach relatively light on the cpu though.
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