I've started a new game and used the built-in pipeline again

I've started a new game and used the built-in pipeline again, am i crazy?

The last time I tried URP there were many bugs and issues, I'm sticking to what I know but I feel I should perhaps switch now whilst I'm not too far into development.

Anyone else in the same boat?

 

Yep. I've worked on a project using URP that was released (an absolutely nightmarish process) and I had another project that was for URP experimentation and self-education (borderline Sisyphean) and it's just awful. If you need to do anything outside of what you can expect from the shaders that ship with it, URP is just dreadful.

 

URP has less bugs and issues than it used to have. They finally added stackable cameras which helped alot. At least for mobile, I find that I get better perfomance with URP so for mobile I think it's worth the extra effort to get things working compared to built-in.

 

Yes and no.

I used URP because my game is heavily graphical and I'm using ECS/DOTS. This is around 10-20 times faster even for simple draws, for my tests. It's so much faster it's basically a bit of a shock. Also I get to stream this stuff in and have dynamic occlusion.

None of that works with built-in because built-in is not a supported target for Hybrid Renderer. I also plan on using Forward+ renderer coming to URP in the future as well, which will allow for higher performance than deferred with more features, like optimised shadows or reflections (basically whatever you can bin in a tile).

A lot of new features like FSR, Eye tracking, PSVR2 specifics, spacewarp etc are not coming to built-in. You would need to deal with that. It is likely though, you don't need all that either. Depends on your goals.

But in my personal experiments over the last few days I got up to 20x performance over built-in but a lot of that is down to Hybrid and DOTS rather than URP. Since Built-in doesn't work with it, it is technically a win for URP.

If you were the sort that was young with at least 3 different hair shades (or hair) then you would probably want to throw caution to the wind, and experiment with a hybrid where DOTS (subscene workflow) + Hybrid Renderer + URP play together to reduce load times to almost nothing and render it at bizarrely good performance for env, but render the rest with classic monobehaviour approach and mono code. This sort of half and half workflow is a really good problem solve that can be added non-destructively, later on though (just means a few imports, tweaks and dumping stuff into subscenes).

I have glossed over it a bit - it is easy for me - but may be more challenging for others who might not really have the time nor energy to faff about. In that case just go built-in.

Thing is so many games don't need that level of performance. So many games have a bottleneck that's actually not rendering the thing, but making the thing to begin with, and for that case, you can't beat what you know.

But I do recommend you make a choice of pipeline that won't change later. Because redoing all the lighting, materials and post is a pain in the butt.

So my answer to if you are crazy is yes and no!

 

It is not crazy if it works for you and does what you expects it to do.

 

No, because almost every Unity game ever released uses it.