Depth of Field Quality 10-15x slower

Hi,
I’m new to HDRP migrating my project.
First I went to URP and when I saw some specific settings for camera and lighting (specially realtime area lights), I decided to give HDRP a try.

I’m almost finishing my migration, but when I added Depth of Field to Physical Camera I was shocked.

With Medium quality I reach from 80-120fps depending on how many lights I have on the scene.
With High quality I get 6 to 8fps with ONE light.

The medium quality degrades so much the image that is hard to understand where is the focus.

The question here: Is this a bug (performance issue) or I should live with this (and of course, roll back to standard)?

Thanks!

Cannot confirm this. Some projects of mine use HDRP and DoF. The performence is ok when using Medium quality. High quality has of course huge impact because it has more samples and full resolution. This is a setting only for high-end hardware. There is always a trade-off between performence and graphics quality. Yes, Medium DoF might not look as good as high quality but if the target hardware cannot afford this, there is nothing you can do. You may try to tweak the quality settings of DoF to match it more your needs. You can find the quality settings in the HDRP asset. I personally do not use the full resolution even on highest tier because it’s not worth regarding the performence drop. And you may not even need to use the full resolution because depending how blurred the background and the distance will be, most untrained eyes will not detect the difference, even more for fast paced games. But for controlled cinematics, you may turn this on for the most important shots.

May I ask about your hardware specs? Because if you get under 10 fps with one post processing effect, your computer must lack the power.

Another tip from experience: Most high quality options in HDRP give you very subtile difference in graphics quality but take too much of your CPU. Think careful about if you really needs this.

  • High quality volumetric lighting: While this looks nice, the performence impact is huge. In most cases normal quality is enough when turning on the Filter option and with rather low intensities.
  • High quality ambient occlusion: Not worth it, because I found the full resolution just cause more noticeable artifacts. Use medium.
  • High quality screen space reflection: This is very worth it because you get so much cleaner results and smoothing. That’s a post process effect I would invest the remaining FPS if your scenes are very glossy.
  • High quality subsurface scattering: Turning on only has a small performence impact but you get less noise. I think it’s worth it when having a lot of vegetation. But if only used for some red ears, I would not use it.

Choose the right quality for post processing is very essential, because HDRP is already very CPU demanding and bound without these effects, because of shadows, culling, light proxy.

Hi,
I’m using Macbook Pro 2017 15", i7 2.9GHZ, 16GB RAM, SSD, RADEON PRO 560 4GB.

I tweaked the settings and yes, the High Quality is indeed very intensive.
I managed to have decent Medium settings, but I have a HUGE problem now.

I realised that the DOF doesn’t take into account the Focal Length in HDRP. Is it expected as non implementation, is it a bug or is it my fault?
I put aperture 1.4 and change Focal Length from 17 to 200mm and nothing happens with the blur. It’s supposed to be higher DOF in 17mm and shallower DOF in 200mm. Am I missing something?

Hey, you need to use “Link fov to physical camera”.

See documentation:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@7.1/manual/HDRP-Camera.html

The “High” quality setting for depth of field is very expensive because it uses a full frame buffer. It should be used with high end configurations only. Your laptop graphics card is not really suitable for such effects if you want to maintain a decent framerate.

I understand.
If I click on "Link fov to Physical Camera I simply loose all settings that were working on my UI script.
So I decided to open a new scene and start from scratch to test.
I recorded this video to showcase the misbehaviour of the DOF in HDRP Unity, at least on my end: