HDRP with iOS support

Any chance we can experiment with HDRP on recent iOS devices anytime soon?

I thought HDRP was “supported” on high-end iOS devices which support compute shaders? I know HDRP is a beast, but I do believe there are use cases for iOS support.

-Thanks

Hi,

We have no plan for now to add the support to IOS.

If you want to experiment with it, you can uncomment this line here:

If you uncomment it then you will be allowed to build on IOS.

However we don’t offer any support in this case. We are aware of few projects with a customize hdrp that are able to run on ipad pro, so we know there is thing working. We mainly don’t officially support IOS because we don’t have the performance. We haven’t done any mobile specific optimization for hdrp (it is even the opposite, we rely on async compute and are doing a lot of “resolve” which are counter productive on gpu tiled archtiecture, we don’t have simplified ligthing code) thus it will run around 5 fps which is useless.

You could of course remove various features, optimize various code etc… And depends on your need you could achieve something. Also we have check it for a while, HDRP run on metal correctly, but if something differ on ios, it is possible that some featuers don’t work at all.

I just got the iPhone 15 Pro and am curious if the limitation still applies to such a capable device? We have a URP branch anyway, but since the HDRP version runs at 60 FPS most of the time on a Steam Deck, I’m under the impression the new iPhone could handle it… But maybe not as you mentioned the gpu tiled architecture thingy.

Hi I was also interested in testing HDRP on a M2 iOS iPad device. In the past when I wanted to make changes to a Unity package, I copied the package from Library/PackageCache/ to the Packages folder. when i do this with the HDRP package on Unity 2022.3.10 the editor always crashes once the project is opened. How does one make the mods persistent these days?

Curious if this has been resolved by now. I run HDRP fine (and with good performance) on an M3 Max Mac chip, curious if it could also run on an M2 iOS (iPad).

Hi, The answer is still the same than previously HDRP with iOS support .
With a small addition: We have done some extra fix on IOS after an experiment (in volumetric and APV mostly), and the new STP upscaler can work on IOS, and thus if you use it, it will allow to run HDRP more smoothly on mobile.

But you are on your own here, no official support.

But out of curiosity, why does it run well on Apple Silicon? And why wouldn’t an iPad Air M1 work as well?

Regarding device like IPad Air M1 that have enough performance to run HDRP, we can still have various artifacts given we haven’t tested it - this often appear in code like volumetric fog that are qui demanding/complex. We don’t have time to investigate those, but we also don’t have way in Unity to enable HDRP only for the specific case of the “IPad Air M1”, if we enable IOS build, it cover a lot of different platform

It is not just a “specific case”, all iPad Air and Pro models have an Apple Silicon chips on board now.

Actually, Apple offers a handy solution for that. See the developer video:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111372/?time=310

You can make that with HDRP and a iOS target this flag is always set when a Xcode project is created from Unity. We also want HDRP on iOS and in general performance improvements for Apple Silicon chips on macOS for both editor and builds. The whole SRP coexistence strategy is awful and not interesting to us.

You could try this package to enable the build on mobile platforms: GitHub - alelievr/HDRP-Mobile: Unlock HDRP to build on mobile devices though you’ll likely experience issues as it’s not officially supported and tested by Unity.