HDRP Upgrade Question

I have a project i have been working on for over a year and am debating on when/if to upgrade to HDRP. Currently i am about 60-100 fps (15-20ms) in procedural dungeons, and am about to build the town. I am using high res textures, a good amount of post FX, and a good amount of Emissive particle effects. I know the HDRP is still technically in "preview", and i have a few questions.

1) Should i expect later versions of HDRP to have better project conversion? Will it be easier to upgrade in the future or now?
2) I've read a ton of posts of performance increase and decreases. Could someone explain why? Specifically, when you would see performance increases vs decreases using the HDRP.
3) How much of a pain is it to upgrade? Any good practices or tricks and tips?
4) Assuming the upgrade process doesn't on some materials, is there a tutorial or a post on how to manually convert them? Is it a long process or a short one?

Would love to hear peoples experiences. I can hold off on upgrading, Though i have been upgrading unity and all my assets so figured i would check in and ask. Any help would be appreciated

 

Why not backup your project and try it yourself, and report back with the findings?

 

Because i want to get the answer's to the questions i ask before i waste 2 weeks on a beta that may have a fatal flaw, or spend 3-4 days trying to figure out why a 100GB+ re import fails.

Thank you for your reply though. Despite the fact that you obviously cannot answer the questions, do not have the experience, and can't provide a single helpful thing. It does make my post less lonely!

 

I'm doing only procedural generation and I got a big drop in FPS from builtin pipeline to HDRP. Most of it (pretty much all of it) coming from the GPU side (HDRP shader graph generation), even when disabling all the fancy stuff (exact same FPS with PBR or HDLit nodes). I'd say a 30 / 40 % FPS drop. Usually it seems that for optimizing, people are considering the CPU side and pushing stuff to the GPU. In my case, it didn't work, I think the CPU side was already well optimized before and I was maybe also GPU bound.
I would not come back from the HDRP because I like what I can do with it, but I'll have to up the minimal requirements for the game.

 

Thank you, this information is gold to me. Sounds really similar to my case. I'm well optimized on the CPU side, and though i can suffer some frame loss, 30-40% is a lot. I've been reading some of the forum posts, and it's hard to tell why some people are getting FPS loss where others are getting FPS game.

One question though. You said you like what you can do with HDRP. Are you talking about stuff like lighting, Post FX's, and Material editing? Stuff that can be done later on in development? Or does it dramatically change how you make the scenes? I know i'll eventually upgrade, Not sure if it's more work to do it now or more work to upgrade in a 3-4 months.

Thank you for your reply!

 

Mostly it's the shadows. I had to do my own shadow map with the builtin because I'm using a spot light for main light. Here, I still had to customize some things, but I could use the HDRP shadow quality and I'm very satisfied. Especially since they are working with the vfx particles and I don't know if it would have been easy to do with my custom shadowmap.
I also like the post processing, except SSAO that's too slow and not so great (much better than what unity made available with builtin, but not at the amplify level).
Right now, my only real problem is the lack of customizable post process. I have some effects with render textures just waiting for this. And of course, I'd like a little optimization of HDRP, on the GPU side.
You also have to take into consideration when you want your game to be finished. Mine won't be until maybe two more years, at which point my already low spec gfx card will really be completly outdated. With middle low gfx cards, I'd already be at more than 100fps in the worst case today.