[RELEASED] GPU Instancer

GPU Instancer is released in the asset store.

You can download demo builds for PC, VR, Mac and Android

Introducing GPU Instancer​

GPU Instancer is an out of the box solution to display extreme numbers of objects on screen with high performance. With a few mouse clicks, you can instance your prefabs, Unity terrain details and trees.

GPU Instancer provides user friendly tools to allow everyone to use Indirect GPU Instancing without having to go through the deep learning curve of Compute Shaders and GPU infrastructure. Also, an API with extensive documentation is provided to manage runtime changes.

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To provide the fastest possible performance, GPU Instancer utilizes Indirect GPU Instancing using Unity's DrawMeshInstancedIndirect method and Compute Shaders.

GPU Instancing results in magnitudes of performance improvement over static batching and mesh combining. Also, other available solutions for GPU Instancing (including Unity's material option and the DrawMeshInstanced method) fail short on limited buffer sizes and therefore result in more draw calls and less performance. By using the indirect method GPU Instancer aims to provide the ultimate solution for this, and increases performance considerably while rendering the same mesh multiple times.

​

GPU Instancer features are:

• Out of the box solution for complex GPU Instancing.
• VR compatible. Works with both single pass and multipass rendering modes.
• Mobile compatible. Works with both iOS and Android.
• Easy to use interface.
• Tens of thousands of objects rendered lightning fast in a single draw call.
• GPU frustum culling.
• GPU occlusion culling (also supports VR platforms with both single pass and multi pass rendering modes).
• Automatically configured custom shader support
• Complex hierarchies of prefabs instanced with a single click.
• Multiple sub-meshes support.
• LOD Groups and cross-fading support (with animation or fade transition width).
• Automatic 2D Billboard generation system (auto-added as last LOD).
• Shadows casting and receiving support for instances (frustum culled instances still can cast shadows).
• Ability to use custom shadow distance per prototype and to choose the LOD to render shadows with.
  
• Support for Floating Origin handling.
• Multiple camera support.
• Unity 5.6 support.
• Well documented API for procedural scenes and runtime modifications (examples included).
• Example scenes that showcase GPU Instancer capabilities.

Prefab Instancing Features:

• Ability to automatically instance prefabs at your scene that you distribute with your favorite prefab painting tool.
• Automatically Add-Remove prefab instances without any aditional code.
• Automatic detection and updating of transform position, rotation and scale changes.
• Full or area localized rigidbody and physics support.
• Nested Prefabs support (Unity 2018.3 and later).
  
• Add-Remove-Update prefab instances with or without instantiating GameObjects (examples included).
• Instance based material variations through API (similar to Material Property Blocks).
• Enabling and disabling instancing at runtime per instance basis.
• API to manage instanced prefabs at runtime.
• Includes mobile demo scene with custom controllers.

Detail Instancing Features:

• Dense grass fields and vegetation with very high frame rates.
• Included vegetation shader with wind, shadows, AO, billboarding and various other properties.
• Support for custom shaders and materials.
• Cross quadding support: automatically turns grass textures to crossed quads.
• Ability to paint prefabs with custom materials on Unity terrain (with Unity terrain tools).
• Ability to use prefabs with LOD Groups on Unity terrain.
• Further performance improvements with automatic spatial partitioning.
• API to manage instanced terrain detail prototypes at runtime (Examples included).
• Editor GPU Instancing simulation.

Tree Instancing Features:

• Dense forests with very high frame rates.
• Speed Tree support with wind animations.
• Speed Tree 8 support with wind animations.
  
• Tree Creator support with wind animations.
  
• Support for Soft Occlusion Tree shaders.
  
• Included billboard baker and renderers.

Third Party Integrations:

• Gaia integration.
• MapMagic integration.

Requirements:

• DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 and Shader Model 5.0 GPU (Windows, Windows Store)
• Metal (macOS, iOS)
• OpenGL Core 4.3 (Windows, Linux)
• Vulkan (Android, Windows, Linux)
• OpenGL ES 3.1 (Android 8.0 Oreo or later)
• Modern Consoles (PS4, Xbox One)

Please also note that even though some integrated graphics cards may satisfy these requirements, they may not provide the boost you can get from GPU Instancing. Therefore, hardware with a dedicated GPU is recommended.

For more information:
Getting Started
F.A.Q.
Tutorial Videos
API Documentation
Performance Analysis

 

Looks very interesting and promising

Will it be compatible with Vegetation studio ? Even if not, I can see how this could very
very useful to use in conjunction with VS.

And second part question I assume this would be great for use with VR ?

 

Thanks for your interest and kind words

For your first question, basically yes. There is no reason why the prefab instancing bit wouldn't work with Vegetation Studio and actually would improve scene performance further in conjunction with it. The detail instancing bit, however, instances Unity Terrain details directly and you would probably have to choose between GPU Instancer and Vegetation Studio according to your needs.

For your second question, well you're definitely right. We have tested with HTC Vive so far and results were quite exciting. Since the primary goal of GPU Instancer is performance, one aspect of using it is to provide better quality visuals with faster and stable frame rates on VR.

In the near future, we will share detailed performance analyses with different hardware.

 

Very exciting thank you. ;-)

I am not a coder, so please forgive what might sound like stupid questions ..

I read through and getting started, a bit fast. The main question would be, do you need to use this system
for terrain / grass and tree's ? Or could you set other objects, like rocks, houses / off shore island meshes that
are decoration only kind of thing ? A mix and match sounds like a huge speed up is possible

 

You have LOD group support, but is it safe to say that it doesn't automatically create LOD groups for each object we choose? Is that something we have to do ourselves?

Great product, by the way.

 

Hello, does it Support SpeedTree? -If yes, does it support fading/billboards ?
Also, are shadows correctly working when objects are outside the frustrum but casted shadows are visible in camera view ?
Thanks.

 

Hi

You can use GPU Instancer to instance any of your prefabs including your rocks, houses and any game object with a MeshRenderer without having a terrain in your scene. (The asteroids scene in the video is a good example of this.) Obviously, the higher the amount of objects in your scene, the more performance boost you will get.

For the terrain details, we have a dedicated system in which you can add your grass, vegetation and any prefab really to use with Unity's terrain painting tools, and we use that data to instance those objects. This also works if you have an existing terrain with painted details on it.

In short, yes, you can instance any mesh (except skinned meshes - which we will support in a future release) and you are not restricted to vegetation. All you need to do is to add your prefabs to the GPU Instancer Prefab Manager and they will be instanced. We will provide some videos that show how to do this very soon.

 

Thanks Neviah

Currently, we do not offer an automatic LOD creation tool. The LOD Support we have is for instancing prefabs that you create as Unity LOD Groups. If you have a prefab with an "LOD Group" component on it, we instance all its LOD renderers and do the necessary calculations to switch LODs on the GPU as well.

 

Thanks for your interest.

We currently do not support SpeedTree (or TreeCreator) objects; although we have a working prototype and we will add support for this in a future release.

About the shadows; yes, the shadows work correctly for the objects that are outside the frustum but are supposed to cast shadows. We have a dedicated buffer and a shader that specifically takes care of this.

So there are no popping or missing shadows

 

Forgot to ask .. so does GPU instanter use special shaders ?

 

Hi Mark

The GPU Instancer experience is designed to be out of the box and seamless, so you don't need to change your materials or do anything at all - you can instance all your prefabs as they are.

A small explanation before answering your question: GPU Instancer uses compute shaders that do intensive work on the GPU before sending data to any surface (or fragment) shaders. So the only requirement here is that the surface shader must be able to accept this data.

Now to answer your question, GPU Instancer comes with versions of standard Unity shaders that are configured to accept this data - and uses them automatically if your materials use the Unity standard shaders (whether standard or standard specular). Also, if you are using a custom or third-party shader, GPU Instancer automatically creates a configured version of this shader.

For replacing terrain grass (texture details), GPU Instancer comes with a custom grass shader that we use instead of the Unity grass shader; that is what you see in the video. However, you can choose to use your own custom grass surface shader and it will again be automatically configured to work with GPU Instancer.

Hope this answers your question

 

Very cool!! It sounds very good. I am hoping I will be able to afford this.

Another thought, would be particle system too ?

This to me is something that you could do very well with this in the store. I am excited about the possibilities
with this.

I believe GPU Instanter has the capability to become a top seller in the asset store.

 

Thanks a lot!

We currently don't have any plans to integrate a GPU based particle system - although a particle system approach definitely sounds exciting

However, GPU Instancer currently supports per-instance based modification of instances' transform data at runtime, so you can use the API to move, rotate and scale instanced prefabs through scripts.

 

Hi @LouskRad, congratulations on the asset store release! I am excited to see some benchmark numbers when they are available. Your description sounds promising.

 

Hi there, and thanks

We have just added some benchmark results to our website. You can view them at:
http://www.gurbu.com/performance

 

Looks very nice. What's the price going to be?

 

Thanks  
We will set a prize tag very soon, and I will let you all know in this thread. But I can say for now that we plan to launch with an initial discounted price until we launch the 1.0 version.

 

Released.... 50$.

 

If we use this to instance 50 objects, each with a different material, will they still require 50 draw calls or will they some how become 1 draw call? Using your black magic.

 

Hi,

50 different materials would mean 50 draw calls. However, GPU Instancer supports material variations for instances similar to material property blocks. That is, you can have a single material on those objects and define how they differ through our API and they will render in a single draw call. An example scene for this is included in the asset package.

 

GPU Instancer has just been released in the asset store!

 

Code (CSharp):

1. - Support for animation baking and skinned mesh renderers.
2.  

Amazing system, which I dream to have for so long time ago. Please make Skinned Mesh support in future How easy to make GPU Instancer to work with a procedural terrain system, like Map Magic or Voxel Terrain system? about GPU Frustum Culling feature, will it support moving prefabs, like AI?

Thanks, amazing wow 0-0

EDIT: I just purchased it, too good to not buy it right away.

 

Thanks a lot!

We are working on integration with various other assets and Map Magic will definitely be among the first.
GPU frustum culling is within our core system, so once skinned mesh rendering is done, it will also support this feature. For now, you can move non-skinned meshes through our API and they are also GPU frustum culled.

 

Demos are impressive, run quite fast on my old Macbook. Btw, I wonder how easy to make my custom toon shaders to be supported by GPU Instancer system? I can't wait for the Map Magic integration.

 

Hello, excuse my ignorance but isn't GPU instancing already managed by unity 2017 by default?
https://docs.unity3d.com/2017.4/Documentation/Manual/GPUInstancing.html
Does your asset make it better, easier or faster?

 

Hi there, I am one of the developers working on GPU Instancer.

Happy to hear it worked out well on your Macbook

GPU Instancer has automatically configured custom shader support. When you add your prefabs on the Prefab Manager or your materials on the Detail Manager for grass textures, it creates a new version of your custom shader for using with GPU Instancer (unless it was already configured to support GPU Instancer). So everything should be done automatically without requiring you to change any shader code.
When you try it out, please share with us how it worked out for your shaders.

 

Wil this work on metal? as metal supports pragma 5 only without geometry shaders.

Does this use geometry shaders?

 

Re Apple: Compute only works on metal as far as I know (and geometry shaders are bad).

 

Hello,
It is perfectly understandable to get confused about why would one require the same feature Unity is already offering. The answer is, it is not the same . Here are the reasons:

1- GPU Instancer uses Indirect GPU Instancing, so there is only one draw call per mesh-material without a limited buffer size. Check out the benchmark results on Asteroid Scene Performance Test, note that Unity's GPU Instancing is enabled for asteroids. There is more explanation on the description about this subject:

Spoiler: Indirect GPU Instancing

To provide the fastest possible performance, GPU Instancer utilizes Indirect GPU Instancing using Unity's DrawMeshInstancedIndirect method and Compute Shaders.

GPU Instancing results in magnitudes of performance improvement over static batching and mesh combining. Also, other available solutions for GPU Instancing (including Unity's material option and the DrawMeshInstanced method) fail short on limited buffer sizes and therefore result in more draw calls and less performance. By using the indirect method GPU Instancer aims to provide the ultimate solution for this, and increases performance considerably while rendering the same mesh multiple times.

2- It is possible to make runtime modifications with API calls without breaking the GPU Instancing. Methods are explained in the API Documentation. Which will improve over time according to user's needs.

3- There are functionalities that are calculated on GPU with Compute Shaders that lowers CPU usage such as frustum culling, terrain detail generation, LOD support, etc.

4- The source code is provided with the package. You can change the system according to your needs.

There are other features that are mentioned in the feature list and there will be more in the upcoming releases.
So to answer your question in short, in most cases it makes it faster especially when your project is slowing down because of CPU usage. It is not as easy as clicking a checkbox on your material, but it is close . You need to add a component and then add your prefab on it and that is it.

 

GPU Instancer does not use geometry shaders. It should work with Metal, since only requirement is Shader Model 5.0 support.

 

That makes sense, thank you!
I'm using custom surface shaders with multiple render targets and composing multiple buffers as a final image (it's a custom deferred rendering, NOT using any Unity 2018 programable render pipeline stuff)
I'm concerned about shader compatibility.
Could you tell me wich are the modifications needed to MANUALLY make my shaders work with your system? (I'm not sure the automatic conversion would work for my case)

 

Your welcome. To add support manually, you need to include "GPUInstancerInclude.cginc" and setup procedural instancing in your shader. Below is an example how. [GPUInstancerPath] is the relative path to main folder named "GPUInstancer"

Code (JavaScript):

1. ...
2. Pass {
3.     ...
4.     CGPROGRAM
5.     #include "UnityCG.cginc"
6.     #include "[GPUInstancerPath]/Resources/Shaders/Include/GPUInstancerInclude.cginc"
7.     #pragma multi_compile_instancing
8.     #pragma instancing_options procedural:setupGPUI
9.     ...
10.     ENDCG
11. }
12. ...

For adding material property variations for instances, check out DefinePrototypeVariationBuffer and AddVariation methods in API Documentation. There is also a demo scene called ColorVariationsDemo which uses these methods.

 

does GPU instancer work with skinned mesh+Ai i mean like a zombie hordes

 

Hi, it is in our planned feature list, to be added in a future update, but currently skinned mesh support is not implemented

 

Hi, @LouskRad , @Gurhanh

This is me again. For now, I wait for Map Magic integration, Speed Tree, Tree Creator support to further learn about your system. So up to this stage, I just do very quick tests on my old PC: High Quality I got a stable 30 FPS for 2560 x 1080, which is pretty good, but would love to have a better frame rate if possible; a stable 50 FPS for Medium quality; and a stable 60 FPS for Low quality (https://i.imgur.com/TYHoUjM.jpg).

The thing I love about your Frustum Culling is, even how fast Camera rotates around, there is no popping objects

Some quick questions, I have not yet read your code, so I have no clue how the system internally works.

1) From your "AddRemoveInstancesDemo", Add Instances, Remove Instances, is there an internal pool system in your system? if so, is it a multi-thread pool or just a normal pool system?

2) From your "PrefabInstancingDemo", you have an internal way to disable or enable Rigidbodies, based on your distance? or I'm not sure about what is "spatial partitioning"? Could I use that data, to disable, enable any component scripts of a prefab?

Thanks.

 

Hi there

First, I should explain a little about the DetailInstancingDemo scene that you tested. This is an extreme case scenario test scene, and it is intended to showcase extreme numbers. While you are on a 500x500 terrain, there are over half a million grass instances. Because the terrain is small, most of the time your detail viewing distance covers the whole terrain (max detail distance is 500-250-150 for High-Mid-Low Quality). So every frame there are calculations being made on half a million instances and many of these are being rendered. Also the vegetation here are not all simple grass quads; there are some plant meshes having over 3000 tris. When you consider these conditions, 30 FPS for 2560 x 1080 is actually a quite good performance on a 960. However, we want to make it better as well We will continue improving the performance in the future updates. For example one of our planned features is occlusion culling. We are also working on an imposter system for big meshes.

Happy to hear that

This scene is intended to show how to do runtime add / remove operations on prefab instances. There is no pooling system, the scene shows how to add extra instances to the ones you started with at runtime and how to remove them. Here is how you do it: In the Inspector window of the Prefab Manager, once you enable the "Enable Runtime Modifications" and "Add/Remove Instances At Runtime" options on the prototype, you can then set up the "Extra Buffer Size". This determines how many more instances you can add without reinitializing the buffers. Once all these are set, you can use GPUInstancerAPI.AddPrefabInstance and GPUInstancerAPI.RemovePrefabInstance API methods to add and remove any instances at runtime. See example code in "AddRemoveInstances.cs".

To set up Rigidbody support, first you need to "Enable Runtime Modifications" on your prototype. Then you add a collider on a GameObject and enable "Is Trigger", then you can add the GPUInstancerModificationCollider script and set the Prefab Manager on it. This will add Rigidbodies on the objects that enter inside this collider, and remove the Rigidbodies when they are out of the collider (after they enter sleep mode). You can check the DeInstancingSphere under the SpaceShip GameObject in the "PrefabInstancingDemo" scene.

Spatial partitioning is an internal system that we use for detail rendering performance. Our Detail Managers use spatial partitioning for loading and unloading detail instances from GPU memory according to the camera position.

P.S. We are currently preparing various tutorial videos that explain these features and demo scenes in depth. I will post here once we upload these videos.

 

Is there a VR demo buikd thst we can test?

 

Hi,
We do not have any demo builds yet. We will share as soon as they are available.

 

Will you be adding lower level api's for this? Something closer to say what the instanced direct api's look like. Just the data required and bypass your high level api entirely.

Like this looks very appealing, but we already have a lot of transform manipulation in jobs and have existing complex partitioned object pooling, etc..

 

Will be nice if some playmaker actions can be made for this, for adding and removing instances

 

Hi,
We will add lower level APIs, like rendering objects with given transform data list. However sending transform updates every frame in large scales to the GPU is not ideal.
We are also planning to provide an API to add custom Compute Shaders, so that you can also make simple transform updates in GPU instead of CPU.

 

Yes, I agree Will be done in a future update.

 

Hi everyone,

We have just uploaded a series of tutorials showing the basics of using GPU Instancer.

You can watch them on YouTube Tutorial Videos Playlist

 

So with post processing added to the camera can you add a video of how your plugin delivers frames per second?

 

Hi there,

I have just added another video showcasing GPU Instancer performance with post processing. You can check it out at this link.

 

Hello, when you first release this video i already took a look at it instantly. Thanks for filling my request.

 

Will this work with touch bending? for example a grass that bends when hit by the players collider?

 

Hi,

Our foliage shader currently doesn't have that feature, but we will add support for this in a future update.

However, since you can use custom foliage shaders with GPU Instancer, you can use a touch-bending shader if you have one as well (assuming that shader works with world positions for its player position calculations).

 

Nice to hear !

Another thing Im planning to use:
fading out objects when they get very close to the camera. ( shader alpha )
Is that possible with instancing?

 

Sure thing. Whatever custom surface shader you use on your prefabs will be auto-converted to work with GPU Instancer. So with your shader, the way your objects fade out with instancing would look exactly the same as without.