Graphic Future in Unity? – LWRP, HDRP, Shader Graph, Visual Effect Graph, Ray Tracing

[RoughSpaghetti3211]

@grafikzeug_1

I find the discussion in this thread very valuable. Being in the situation that a choice about the render pipeline direction of a project has to be made soon, I wonder if there are any new thoughts on the topic of URP/ HDRP. With roots in 3d graphics and offline rendering, I’ve recently noticed the trend of unification (in the form of adaption of the universal scene description format that can be used with different render engines). As I understand, unity seems to go another way completely by splitting development into two incompatible strands.

I’d be grateful for your thoughts and knowledge on the matter.
Are there plans of merging the two pipelines in the future to make it easier to deploy a project to very different platforms? Or will it be made possible to have both pipelines in one project? How do you guys make informed decisions now when you want to make a game ranging from mobile-ready to next-gen consoles without compromising visual fidelity on the latter?

Thanks for yout input!
Felix

I’m in the same boat. Graphic features required for our project are spread across all three pipelines Best I can do is hold off and see how each pipeline matures for example will shadergraph support tessellation? And will it be in URP or HDRP or both ? Really hard to choose a direction atm.

[BattleAngelAlita]

How about DIY SRP? Standard is a black box, HDRP is good but don’t scalable down, and URP… ahh… it was started like simple example for new SRP feature, and somehow growth to some strange homunculus.

[Neto_Kokku]

@BattleAngelAlita

How about DIY SRP? Standard is a black box, HDRP is good but don’t scalable down, and URP… ahh… it was started like simple example for new SRP feature, and somehow growth to some strange homunculus.

That should be the biggest strength of SRP, and I do expect some nice 3rd party SRPs to show up at some point, but right now the core SRP is not yet stabilized nor documented (case in point: the 2018 Catlike custom SRP tutorial that became obsolete with 2019), so investing time into a full featured renderer is not a hot proposition.

[neoshaman]

I have yet to come back to reading teh source, but I wonder how much is close where we can’t do a franken custom HDRP anyway. I know light isn’t accessible to layman in the shader graph, because HDRP light are quite complex beast, which is great because HDRP is mostly specialised to only high fidelity.

So making a game that scalable, it’s either URP or built in. Be sure your need are covered by the given platform.

I wait for catlike coding to finish his new SRP tutorial to jump back to custom SRP and evaluate (which also mean being able to modify hdrp and urp if code are still available).

[RoughSpaghetti3211]

@Neto_Kokku

That should be the biggest strength of SRP, and I do expect some nice 3rd party SRPs to show up at some point, but right now the core SRP is not yet stabilized nor documented (case in point: the 2018 Catlike custom SRP tutorial that became obsolete with 2019), so investing time into a full featured renderer is not a hot proposition.

Using 3rd party plugins is a legal mess. It would take better part of a year to get a custom render pipeline to go through legal if not impossible. Most likely impossible