What will be added to high end mobiles for VFX graph?

I have been using VFX graph quite a bit on android (with vulkan, OpenGLES3.2 does not work) and IOS.
I have not seen any limitations, so wonder why the roadmap entry on mobile support for vfx graph has been ‘in-progress’ for a while. Is there anything new coming for this?

https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/c/119-urp-support-compute-capable-devices-only-high-end-mobile-support?utm_medium=social&utm_source=portal_share

1 Like

Hi @DevDunk ,

Indeed, we have been constantly working on improving the support on mobile and fixing many issues, however, and if the support seems good at a first glance, we still have too many issues on multiple mobile hardware on our test farms to claim that we support mobile for games that would ship on a large range of mobile phones.

With this work, and because VFX Graph is using Compute Buffers so much, we are realizing how much compute support on mobile is very fragmented and unstable (often on the driver or even hardware side), and that it is not even about low end vs high end mobile (some recent very powerful phones actually have issues with compute buffers) and we think that probably we won’t be able to claim good mobile support until we have a CPU backend.

We might reconsider this card to be more precise and better clarify our current status and the next steps in the coming months based on the lessons learned.

3 Likes

Interesting. Guess I got very lucky myself. Whenever I used vulkan it ‘just worked’.
Just OpenGLES which always is a headache with compute shaders

IMO to some degree the blame should be placed on phone manufactures to not have proper feature support and let customers complain to them. Not on unity to gimp their engine cause of flaky support. :stuck_out_tongue:

After all it’s often up to the dev what minimum android version is supported. These things are a factor too.

I wonder what the percentage of devices really have these problems. And if those issues can be fixed with enough complaints from customers to manufacturers that games that should work don’t.

2 Likes

Is there any ETA for the CPU backend? I love the VFX graph, but a CPU backend has been mentioned already more than 3 years back here on the forums, but the card is still in “Under Consideration” on your feature site.

That probably means it’s at least going to take 2 years, probably longer or never in this case

Would love to see this implemented.