Feedback HDRP built-in shaders should support Streaming Virtual Texturing.

Hidden in the documentation is this important note on Streaming Virtual Texturing:

The built-in High Definition Render Pipeline shaders (such as Lit and Unlit) don’t support SVT.

Firstly, this sad and really important information should appear more clearly on the compatibility and requirement page. Then, why is that? What is the point of Virtual Texturing if we absolutely need to author shader graphs for it to work properly?

Virtual Texturing benefits projects where memory is an issue. Many use cases would be: You develop a game on PC, then port it on console. Then you realize the system runs out of memory often and therefore need to agressively reduce memory usage. Virtual Texturing looks like a godsend! But it is not as you need to convert all materials in existence to conform to it, which takes a lot of time and is not guaranteed to work. So you end up abandoning the endeavour and look for another solution.

 

Even I find it quite strange why aren't they motivating users to use such a important features by integrating it in default shaders/materials, Even I don't use streaming virtual textures because it means creating a new shader that matches functionality of the default LIT shaders along with managing keyowrds to limit the no. of variants and compuutation cost on the shader side. (It's just too much of a hassel for small to medium projects)

I have spotted quite a few people on discord servers asking for this exact same feature (asking where they can get the granite SDK for unity HDRP/built-in) as they don't even know it is already integrated in HDRP by default.

Also, lack of documentation and examples isn't helping this as well.

I do understand there are some limitation to this technique that maybe they don't wanna make this is the default behavior but it would be really helpful if they include example shaders/materials along with sample scenes showing this feature.

 

Here's the one I made based on the default Lit shader. It took some digging through their demo video and GitHub examples to learn how to do it. I too thought it would be just a simple checkbox on the shader. But I'm not currently using it because there is a CPU cost to it and it affects frame rate and I don't have enough textures to fill up all the VRAM just yet.

 

Hey, Alexandre good to see you outside of our discord server.
You may be able to find out more from the experimental feedback page.


I think, because of the preview state, that's why it'ss super buried.
From our early experiments, it's also vastly different from its UE counterpart sadly.

ultimately I agree with you, not being able to expand on built-in shaders is just completely counterproductive.

Best of luck moving forward

 

@Ruchir, Just convert this one from RemyUnity, plug virtual texture node setup instead of the normal texture sampler, it should be doable witout dying of oldness : https://github.com/RemyUnity/SG-HDRP-Lit/tree/2021.3