In this post, we cover the status, upcoming release plans, and future vision for our Scriptable Render Pipelines.
We launched this series of blog posts to clarify what features and improvements we’re prioritizing throughout next year and into 2024 and 2025, as our mission is to enable you to create extraordinary games of all kinds and reach your players wherever they are.
Visit the Games Focus series thread to find a list of available posts and to share feedback about the series.
Questions, comments, and suggestions are all welcome.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
What I am most interested in is the work going on on the gpudriven branch that has become stale due to the changes to the graphics repo. Any news on that that can be shared ?
The biggest dream for URP and HDRP are still that they would become a single pipeline with a quality slider. This is a major edge that Unreal has over Unity, that Unity forced you to pick your poison; permanently lower visual quality with URP but running everywhere, versus higher visual quality with HDRP but losing a part of your audience because it won’t run on most mobile devices.
Unity has forced this Sophie’s Choice scenario on all users. I realize that the HDRP contains a lot of stuff that isn’t appropriate for a low-end mobile device. But choosing to support end-users all the way down also means that our product is permanently barred from looking as amazing as possible on a high-end desktop.
All the 2022 additions are certainly nice. But the elephant in the room is that it’s impossible to make a product with Unity that looks as good as possible on a high-end desktop, and runs serviceably on a mobile device. It’s a major loss that we’re still grieving having proceeded with URP, and having only left Unreal because of Epic’s shenanigans.
We only have one feature request. One render pipeline with a quality slider. I can’t understand why you can’t just conditionally compile stuff out. You make your own compilers! How is this beyond your skills?
AMD released new realtime GI solution which will be open source. Could you get this into SRP as soon as available?
It’s under here Publications - AMD GPUOpen
GI-1.0: A Fast and Scalable Two-level Radiance Caching Scheme for Real-time Global Illumination
I’m very much looking forward to coexistence cause the platform limitations are the main reason I didn’t even consider HDRP and opted for URP.
One thing I noticed is that it was mentioned different scenes can be for URP or HDRP. Is that more or less the setup? Is the reason cause lighting and scene configurations are so different?
Can the data between scenes be synced otherwise? Or is it expected to utilize prefabs to manage the two separate but effectively similar scenes?
I can understand this may be a challenging transition hence the need for two scenes if that’s the case.
What’s the expectation or goal of the workload for a formerly URP project to start adopting HDRP/URP workflow?
The birth of the two render pipelines has been a painful one, and the wounds they have inflicted go deep. I am delighted to hear that the healing process has officially begun. Yes, sanity has arrived as an afterthought, and much can be said about all the could-have-should-have’s to avoid the absurd growth in complexity, but I doubt there is much to learn from scrutinising parents past decisions. Instead, I sincerely hope the ambition to “increasing the compatibility between URP and HDRP” is an absolute top priority. The pain of learning two newly invented ways of doing (roughly) the same thing, while the legacy way is still lurking around and adding to the confusion is (mildly speaking) frustrating.
Efforts like Shader Blocks and the adoption of Render Graph in URP gives me reason to be optimistic. Surely “Render Pipeline Coexistence” will be a mess at first, but I believe it is the way forward as it will inspire/force more alignment between the two render pipelines. Throw the two youngster into the same yard and let them settle their arguments.
Much work is needed to make this Duality become Unity again, a hallmark of simplicity in design. Cheers to everyone at Unity pushing this agenda.
Unity was built with and around the Asset Store. It encouraged people to buy and build with a big variety of assets from different developers with different maintenance approaches. I have entire workflows built around assets that provide something I could not build myself. That would not be an issue - but the introduction of the render pipelines, each progressing at different rates is just a big mess.
Some developers are updating compatibility, some are even forcing a certain pipeline. Having them in a project at the same time is no longer possible or extremely buggy. So yeah, as someone working with many assets the decisions of the last years have been alienating and very frustrating - especially since the whole asset / package workflow was so encouraged by Unity itself.
Is there any information on when the standard pipeline is planned to be deprecated ?
Also will this mean all projects that use it will be btoken completly ? Or will remain as a backend thing ?
The main issues are that URP does not support replacement shaders like standard, with grab of material properties and also is far slower in image effects.
So in some cases standard is still the only option.
You can find more info on what we first want to complete before deprecating the Built-in RP (BiRP, we don’t use “standard” internally because it gets confusing with Scriptable RP) here.
We indeed first want to have an alternative for surface shaders called Shader Blocks. You can read about that here .
Is there any plans to recreate the full functionality of replacement shaders with the URP before remove the standard ? Currently can render the objects with a custom shader using the renderer feature, but the material - shader used does not inherit the same named parameters from each material of the objects.
EDIT:
I see a similar feature in Unity 2022, seems like is what is missing
Indeed, Unity 2022.2 has replacement shader functionality for the SRPs (URP and HDRP).
There are no plans to backport so it will be in 2022 and up indeed.
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