As right now bug reports of XR in HDRP get rejected most of the time because of priorities and resources, what’s the future plan for doing XR with high visual fidelity? URP is missing many of the features needed for rendering believable worlds and especially characters and not an option for now.
Will there be more investment / improvements for XR on HDRP in the future?
Edit: And if answer to last question is NO, can we at least submit bug fixes ourselves? I tried a few times, but to no luck. I would like to be able to do updates in the future without patching the sources of HDRP every time afterwards.
I’m curious, what platforms or devices can render HDRP output while providing a meaningful XR experience?
HDRP in my book is exclusively for Desktop (Win, Mac, Linux) and Console games/apps.
XR is meaningful on mobile, VR headsets (Vision, Quest, Hololens), and (still a long ways to go) WebXR.
Am I overlooking something?
Because if not, I doubt there’s much effort going to be expended into such an odd combination.
It’s simple: PCVR, which has a few million users and is constantly growing.
VR is not only mobile/standalone as Meta would like.
And numbers will probably grow as soon as Valve is releasing their next headset.
To back this up with some numbers; active headsets on Steam are currently at around 3m:
Standalone (Meta) has for sure a higher user base, estimated to be around 20m:
But the user base is very price sensitive, free to play title are dominating the Meta Quest store.
For Apple Vision Pro the market size is unknown, but probably in the low 6 digits, like 100-200k, so not a relevant market yet.
Revenue split of our company is roughly 3.5 : 1 in favor of PCVR market (Steam).
Of course we could also build a PCVR version with URP instead of HDRP, but as we aim for AAA graphic fidelity this would be very hard to achieve with a small team using URP.
Ah right, to me “XR” is synonymous with “AR” for some reason.
Still, VR requires a high-end computer even with URP graphics, so I’d expect it to mainly make sense for high-end PoS application ie car sales and such where the cost of the hardware (up to $10k) plays a minor role. But hey, never underestimate the enthusiast gamers.
This is not correct. You can of course build something with both URP and HDRP which runs on normal consumer hardware, e.g. gaming PCs.
VR is more demanding for sure, but a 1080 / 2070 / 3060 GPU is fine to play most PCVR title.
Can’t wait until VR headsets get to the point where one can actually and easily tell/see the difference between URP and HDRP renders! Probably a long time yet? Even at the moment the slight difference in quality between the basic renderer and urp is only on a very expensive set of goggles. I think Unity has more urgent updates and services to do than VR/XR for the very few fortunate to have lots of spare dollars. But when it happens..eyes will certainly pop!
In my experience you have to strip a ton of HDRP features to run VR on those GPUs. At that point it’s similar to URP in quality and performs similar or worse, while having more complexity.
For some effects using HDRP is nice, but for 99% of the projects URP is ‘better’ imho.
While unstable, HDRP does keep it’s XR support and companies like Varjo support HDRP well, since their users run 4090+ hardware for advanced visualizations. For consumers is a lot harder unless you need a feature that is impossible in URP (most have 3rd party assets, which will easily be worth it imo)
If you don’t agree, I would love to hear what your project requires that is noticable for consumers but not in URP
We are using following features, which are not available in URP and important for us:
- SSS
- special shader like Hair, Fabric, Eye, StackLit
- Water system
- physical based sky
- DLSS (actually best AA and gives the needed performance boost)
You don’t need a 4090 to run all of this, it works fine on modest GPUs (1080+) if you do some tweaking.
On a 4000 generation you can even use ray tracing on top of this in VR already.
With third party tools I think all of these are doable in URP as well. But fair enough, if this is the exact stack you need the HDRP might be good. Just wasn’t succesful using it myself.
Do you use all of those at the same time? If so what is performance like now?
yes, using all of them, and as said, runs on 1080+ with half framerate 45 FPS, and full framerate on 3080+
for some of the effects alternatives in asset store is available, but not for all of them. There is e.g. no comparable SSS solution for URP which runs in VR. SSS is quite tricky but absolutely needed for believable characters. Preintegrated SSS (which is available in a few URP shader sets) is not sufficient, it needs a screen space based solution for realistic effects.
Next bigger issues in URP are shadow quality (even with stuff like umbra shadows asset, which improves shadows a lot, it’s still lacking fine details), proper specular occlusion, and many other light related things.
I hope that URP catches up at some point, but I doubt it, as integrating such effects and proper lighting make the pipeline much more complicated and with this harder to use.
I already tried to bring some of the stuff to URP, and while I certainly got some improvements, there is still a long way to go to match HDRP visuals.