Shader Graph vs code

Unity Engine
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1

Unity has been my hobby for more than 13 years now, never used shader graph, never bothered to install it, always thought it would be a waste of time and the output wouldnt be optimised at all.

On a side note, all this time i have been thinking that the custom render pipelines are generally unnecessary and targets a very limited amount of people.

I still use 2020.3 with the purpose of mainly selling packs on the assetstore and doing custom architectural simulations and didnt update yet.

But i recently get complaints from assetstore customers about not supporting render pipelines and i read somewhere that those above will be included in the core with the 2022 releases.

So, was i wrong? Should i start using shader graph and urp/hdrp abominations purely for the assetstore customers?

2

Yes you were definitely wrong here. URP and HDRP are where the resources are going into now and most people want to be using the latest tech.

ShaderGraph can now also target the old built-in pipeline.

Can you sometimes optimize better with hand-written shaders? For sure. But depending on the kind of asset users might appreciate the customization of a shadergraph shader. And it also makes your job of maintaining shaders much easier.

A simpler to use surface-shader successor is in the works as well, but that’s far off.