https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/UnityHDRP/
Looks like a healthy and growing list. Some of these games will no doubt have HDRP experts wincing at the questionable settings, but much love to how many HDRP-powered games there are out there!
I created that list 
(there’s also unityURP)
Biggest issue is it doesn’t show il2cpp games, many HDRP games use il2cpp, out of memory some popular games using HDRP with il2cpp: Metal: Hellsinger, V-rising, Road 96, Car Mechanic simulator 2021
Although you can find il2cpp games listed in the more general Unity engine list
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Look at all those indie games that’ll never get a Switch port, even though most of them look no more complex than the average looking Switch game.
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So are these all the HDRP games on steam? Is there better detection (not sure IL2CPP has anything to do with it as it improves CPU perf… and probably not enough to port to switch haha)
yeah all games on steam are automatically detected no matter how big or small it is, including public demos
it does it by reading file names (HDRP has certain files only available when using HDRP), with il2cpp none of these files are available by default so it can’t detect them as HDRP/URP, but it can still tell if it’s unity or not
Unity dropped support for mono on consoles back in Unity 2018. The only platforms where you can still use mono are Windows, Mac, and Linux (you can build for Android using mono but can’t publish as it’s only 32-bits).
HDRP also stopped supporting Switch in the 2019 cycle. The Switch Nvidia GPU does support all features required by HDRP, but since HDRP ridiculously high main thread CPU cost just kept growing with each new version, the weak Switch CPU probably couldn’t keep up. It’s an issue even on PS4/XB1, where getting 60fps with HDRP is near impossible.
(You can get HDRP to run on Switch by modifying it, but I personally never tried it myself and never dove deep into its source code to see if there’s anything that can be done about the wild main thread costs without access to the Unity source itself).
Though now that URP has deferred rendering it’s at least possible to migrate over in case push comes to shove, even if it’s a major hassle.
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CPU is definitely becoming the bottleneck, with next gen GPU’s coming in a few months, CPU will become more of a problem, at least on PC…
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Wait the latest Syberia are using HDRP? Kinda surpising since the previous game was using UE4, make me wonder why they switch
Because it’s way, way easier to make games in Unity? I love all engines, but Unreal is a pig to dev in, and would harm indies. Same for my choice of using HDRP vs URP: HDRP is a lot less work for a small dev to make something look good with 4K support.
It sucks at anything <PS4 but since day one, HDRP staff have patiently explained it’s for PS4 and above. Docs reflect this. So if indies need an easy time and aren’t targeting switch or mobile they’re good.
HDRP running space ship demo on PSVR2 was eye opening for me. Literally, since it uses eye tracking to reduce bandwidth.
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Well i can’t say much regarding UE though, since i never dive deep into it.
Interesting , i mean i know that HDRP can run on PS4 but the part where it runs on PSVR2 is an interesting information, i didn’t know that.
I disagee with the staff member that HDRP requires a bigger team. It doesn’t, as you know from that steam list. I believe they aren’t actually making games and simply assumed with that comment that the games would be mobile level, in which case yeah URP is easier. For 2D or basic platformers etc.
The reason HDRP is easier for any visual title, is because of a few things:
- it’s easier to get lighting correct. everything is explained, everything has a matching exposure and lighting preset. Match those up and it instantly looks fantastic
- no fighting of assets or 3rd party stuff - hdrp has all you need
- no optimising woes as you can control HDRP extensively
- way better documentation and video resources
I’m having a much easier time making things look good than in URP, and I’m saving substantial time avoiding rolling my own tech, or reproducing missing things in URP.
Having said that, I’m not a typical user so what is trivial to me may be a big gap for someone else. So I guess that’s the context.
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Assuming it’s all correct, some entries on this list are pretty interesting as they aren’t going for the photo-realistic style so I’m curious what benefits HDRP gives over built-in? For example if you’re running a PSX styled game, you don’t really need super detailed shadows or lighting, so what benefit does HDRP give you that you’d want?
any hard data on that?
None that I can share, but last time I got a prospective port of an HDRP game it wasn’t certain if even a PS4 would run it since by just sitting on the main menu with nothing going on HDRP would use 8ms of main thread time by itself. Not to mention using almost 1GB of RAM on shader variants.
The current gen consoles and their vastly improved CPUs are blessing for such Unity games.
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Remember that it wasn’t until Unity 2021 where URP got crucial features like point light shadows, decals, deferred rendering and a few more. So if you wanted shader graph in a project you started using Unity 2019 and 2020, HDRP was the less limiting choice, specially when many people see built-in as “deprecated”.
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VFX graph’s being ported from C++ to DOTS at the moment.
For HDRP to follow suit, that’d fix the problem. The amount of CPU side work HDRP has to do was predicted pretty much from day 1 by Seb Lagarde on these forums. He said that there wasn’t much the could do to increase HDRP performance on CPU until other parts of Unity improve.
Sounds like we’re still waiting for that. But it sounds to me that means porting SRP to it or at the least, calling out into DOTS land for culling, sorting etc.
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8ms empty is a lot. I thought that SRP batcher took care of most of it, keeping the cooked geometry on the GPU and only sending transform matrices, now I’m curious, did seb say which other parts of Unity need to improve?
it was moved to the “under consideration” portion of the roadmap, so no promises there unfortunately
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