Effects created using VFX Graph not showing on Android

I create a small game prototype to check the new Unity features.

URP and Post Effects are working well but VFX (Compute Shader) do not display at all, only on my PC.

Is it supported on Android devices?

Tested using 2 Android, Mali and Snapdragon.

 

thank you so much for your answer.

 

one more quesiton, is there a way to check if the mobile gpu support SSBO?

 

Thank you, for VFX Graph tool how many should i have ? 128? Depends of the effect?

My device mark true for ComputeShader as before, i add the SystemInfo.maxComputeBufferInputsVertex and i got a value of 4.

 

I did more tests using multiple phones, effects visual fidelity depends on the Vertex Buffer count.
4, nothing
24 show with errors
and go on.

I will mark this as close, at this state Graph VFX is unusable on android devices, even in prototype state.
Will come back here one year later.

Thank you again.

 

Effect team in charge of making effects prototype do love the VFX Graph. But saddly we focus on mobile games.

For now wait is better

Keep the good work!

 

Hey, @JulienF_Unity thanks for getting back with us on this. Would it make more sense for the VFX Graph to be marked as still in "preview" then? At least for certain platforms. That or maybe in the description of the package flag certain platforms as "preview" and some as "verified". That way it would prevent teams such as ours from spending time using it for mobile development (or VR as other people have pointed out) just to find out that it isn't yet supported on that platform.

Don't misunderstand me. We are very excited about the VFX Graph and very much enjoyed what we have used it for so far. It's just frustrating to spend time on something thinking it's out of preview but it's not.

TL;DR; We should mark certain platforms such as mobile and Oculus Quest as "preview" and other platforms such as desktop as "verified" in order to prevent developers from spending a lot of time using a tool thinking it is "verified" for all platforms because it is marked as "verified" in the package manager.

Edit: typos

 

And can we have any idea when it could be ?

 

Ooops. I was hoping to use VFX Graph on an Oculus Quest project. When using UniversalRP, at least the shaders compile. With legacy (what we usually use for our project), we're getting some shader compilation errors. It's the same error as reported here, but I don't know how to fix it when using legacy instead of UniversalRP.

With UniversalRP and Visual Effect Graph 7.3.1 (and Unity 2019.3.12), apparently the line renderers work (e.g. the lightning in the demo package) but the regular particles render as lines, so e.g. the fire from the demo package is badly broken.

Another concern, of course, is performance ... but first step is making it work at all.

 

The way we currently use it, on desktop and PS4, what is implemented with the legacy render pipeline is fully sufficient.

HDRP added way too much overhead for VR the last time I checked, and performance of Universal RP is also noticeably worse when testing on Quest (that's performance in general, not specific to VFX Graph or PostProcessing). The only reason I have seen so far to use Universal RP is because PostProcessing V2 is completely broken with legacy on Quest - but while the URP PostProcessing does work on Quest in principle, it adds too much GPU processing to actually be usable on that device.

Besides, switching over to Universal RP would require a lot of porting work.

It may not be officially supported for the built-in renderer but actually works quite well with it. There is a folder com.unity.visualeffectgraph@7.3.1\Shaders\RenderPipeline\Legacy included for that, and has been since the earliest alphas. I had created my first VFX prototypes using HDRP but then quickly moved back to legacy. Admittedly, the quality with HDRP was superior - but performance with legacy was so much better that the lesser quality was a decent trade.

Desktop (PC) and PS4 works fine, only Quest gives me shader errors during builds when using legacy. Those shader errors disappear when switching to URP but rendering VFX Graphs on Quest is buggy, as described in my previous posting.

On the Quest. I have never seen issues in the editor.

The page requires login to FogBugz and I don't have a login.

 

I understand that. It was announced from the beginning that legacy isn't the focus for VFX Graph, so I'm well aware that I'm taking a bit of a risk, and super-happy that I can take that risk and things didn't break until 2019.3.14 / 7.3.1. If a VFX Graph or Unity update breaks legacy, it will probably mean I'll stay on the last version where it worked for the time being. I used to always be on the latest alpha of Unity a long time ago (when alphas were still only available under NDA) but became a lot more conservative in the last few years. Currently, Unity 2020 is not on option for us due to lots of breaking changes in how VR is handled.

I do try URP (and previously LWRP) every once in a while to see if it has become a viable option for our project. That's how I found out that VFX Graph shaders do compile for Quest (which is one step towards porting our game for Quest) but there are still showstopper issues (performance, which is expected, and artefacts):

Yeah, that does look very much like it. Basically, my next step with this is reviewing VFX Graph / URP for Quest again once the obvious issues are fixed, and I believe URP performance is now also a strong focus of the team working on it.

Unfortunately, like so often in Unity in the last few years, the approaches between Shuriken and VFX Graph are so fundamentally different that moving back and forth between those systems is not really an option. PostProcessing is another "great" example, so are the render pipelines, or networking. It's a true nightmare because basically, Unity has turned from a unified tool capable of lots of different things into a chaotic toolbox where you need to work with completely different tools, to achieve the same results, depending on what other tools you are already using.

The way I would expect this to work in an authoring tool like Unity:

1. Add node based authoring interface to Shuriken
2. Have a button to turn (old) inspector based systems into node based systems ("port to new interface")
3. Build new "engine" using the new node-based authoring tool, so shuriken systems can easily be ported to VFX graph
4. Extend node-based authoring tools with features beyond what was possible with Shuriken
5. Where possible, add those new features also to Shuriken
6. When the new VFX Graph engine works perfectly with all platforms (and, ideally, with all render pipelines including legacy): Deprecate Shuriken

Obviously, the render pipelines should follow the same approach. At some point, legacy would factually become obsolete (because you can do everything you could do with legacy also with URP, and there's a straightforward upgrade path that doesn't require recreating half your existing game). Once any given system is factually obsolete, it can be deprecated and only kept for the current LTS, and then completely removed in the next "major release" of Unity.

I'll look into it. That was a comparatively simple test project, anyways, so shouldn't be too hard to file it as a bug report. Unfortunately, legacy and URP are so different that properly setting up tests like that takes a lot of time that I could also spend developing my game. Had the approach I outlined above been properly followed, doing that kind of test would just be a matter of changing the render pipeline setting back and forth between legacy and URP. But as it is, it basically means keeping two projects with lots of places where the same setting (e.g. anti-aliasing) is in completely different places.

 

That said ... is there maybe an easy way to fix this shader compilation error?

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader error in 'Hidden/VFX/EffectName/System 1/Output Particle Quad': invalid subscript 'stereoTargetEyeIndex' at /Program Files/Unity/Hub/Editor/2019.3.14f1/Editor/Data/CGIncludes/UnityCG.cginc(786) (on gles3)

 

Interestingly, adding a GPU-option for Shuriken would have been tremendously useful for us because we've had one hardware configuration where apparently, Shuriken being CPU-based caused significant performance issues (it's a while back and may have already been fixed in another way, IIRC it was specific to some AMD-CPU(s) and as I don't have testing machines with AMD CPUs I had to rely on playing feedback). But I can imagine that porting all of Shuriken to GPU isn't feasible, and I don't know if there would be a way to put some parts on GPU, and keep others on CPU.

Also, interestingly, on Oculus Quest / Android, there is one case where a GPU implementation of an effect completely kills performance, while the CPU implementation works comparatively well. I haven't looked deeper into that but it certainly made me aware that there are circumstances where doing stuff on GPU to improve performance can completely destroy performance. In that specific case, being able to switch to a DOTS-based implementation might be the solution.

Of course, I completely understand that implementing "the same thing" three times with different approaches (regular CPU, GPU, DOTS-based CPU) will take a lot of time and finishing new features like URP, HDRP, VFX Graph and so forth is already probably taking much longer than all of you would hope. But from a user perspective, it would really help to differentiate between authoring tools (e.g. Shuriken Inspector vs. VFX Graph node based editor) and underlying "engine" (e.g. Shuriken CPU, VFX Graph GPU, and maybe something new that is DOTS-based).

One area where I believe that's what you're actually trying to accomplish are the new physics engines: According to the blogs, it's one "authoring" layer (and that includes the scripting API) but you can switch out engines (Havoc vs. Unity DOTS-based). The only problem there is that it's probably not compatible at all with PhysX's authoring layer in Unity. And I believe to a certain degree this is fortunately also the case with PostProcessing URP vs. PostProcessing HDRP.

Given the name of the engine, "Unity", that unified approach to designing different systems of the engine would be tremendously helpful for any longer term, or more complex projects. I wouldn't expect 100% feature-parity. Like, I know that there are things from VFX Graph that I cannot use because I'm still on legacy, and I believe there are also HDRP-only VFX Graph features that don't work with URP. In cases like that, what's important, IMHO, is a way to add "different implementations" on the project level, kind of like what conditional compilation does on the code-level.

 

what is the status on support for the VFX graph on Android devices? Is it in any of the upcoming versions?

 

how far into the future are these 'planned' features?

 

Arrrgh. I really wish the package manager had the ability to tag things as "partially" production ready instead of just the "preview" tag. I think it's reasonable to assume that if something isn't marked as "preview" that it's production ready. The manual makes this even more confusing.

Prior to 8.2.0 the manual requirements were stated as: "Universal Render Pipeline (URP): Unity 2019.3 or newer."
With 8.2.0 this was added: "The Visual Effect Graph is not out of preview with URP and so only supports a subset of platforms that URP supports. It also does not support every feature that is does with HDRP and also only supports unlit particles."

Good info, which should have been included and made clear earlier. I understand there is a cost with maintaining good documentation, especial during "preview stage". But once it's out of preview, how much spelunking and forum reading should have to be performed by actual users in order to know its "safe" to use something? This is especially costly for small teams whose "VFX guy" is also wearing a lot of other hats.

I was wondering why my VFX was crashing on Android whenever it ran out of particles to render. Such an obvious edge case I figured I was missing something. Turns out I was. It's not production ready.

 

Thanks for your reply. Appreciated.

For what it's worth, VFX Graph is working fine for me on Android using URP with VFX Visual Effects, so long as there are particles. It locks up for me after a burst spawn has run its course, or if I dynamically set the spawn rate for a system to zero (in order to allow existing particles to fade out).

I posted about this in another thread but have been in mini-crunch. I'll try to get you a small example shortly (on that thread).

BTW: The work-around hack I've used is to redirect emissions to a position far outside the camera frustum instead of turning the rate to zero. A different hack was required for Burst spawning.

 

Super interesting. Any chance you found another fix?

 

@Lance-Grooms - what version of Unity of you using?

 

The version we were using was 2020.1.2f1.
Never found another workaround. We were also using ui toolkit which interacted poorly with VFX and other UI editor elements. Due to time restraints, we just stuck with the workaround that worked. Sorry I can't be more usefult than that.

 

Hello,

What is the current state of VFX graph + URP + Mobile (Android and iOS) ?

Thanks

 

For me, I was able to run VFX + URP + Mobile using Vulkan grahics API, and do get artifacts described earlier with OpenGLES3

 

It would be great to have an update on this: what is the current state of VFX Graph + URP + Mobile?

 

Unity, where you at

 

Oh, nice. Finally, VFX high-end mobile support!
Good time to return..

 

Would be super nice if there were some type estimate, at least the quarter, in which you imagine moving the 2021.2 beta up to a full release.

 

Hi there, I have been using URP-2D-VFX with 2021.2 through all beta and now the final release but until now I did not understood the limitations for it, working on mobile phones :-(

It works quite good on my new phones but on older phones is does not which is a pity. Therefore I was wondering about the post one of you made earlier last year:

Is this still in plan and will this be updated some time. Would be great to have the VFX Graph for all devices (even for old ones) working because it is so much better to work with then with the classic particle system!

Thanks and best!
Somehow Luke

 

It's on the roadmap in "Under consideration" tab, so I guess it is not researched/decided yet, and even if they decide to implement this now, then most likely not faster than Unity 2022, but my personal guess is 2023.

 

Visual Effect Graph 12.1.0 not support Android ?
I created a new veg, it compile error on gles. But dx is ok.

 

THK, i will be try later 2021.2.0b14.

by the way, the error is on 2021.2.0f1, urp, veg 12.1.0
It't ok on 2020.2.2f1, urp veg 10.2.2

 

Switch to Vulkan is work.

 

TL;DR;, is Unity VFX Graph already working with 2021.2.0 on mobile devices? Thank you