URP vs standard render

Hello,
This is a newbie question.
I'm wondering, graphically speaking what are the differences between the standard renderer and URP?

I know URP has better support for the shadergraph, that's great for anything custom.
I'm wondering how does URP handle lighting and reflections different;y.
I do have some plugins for standard but they don't support URP yet.

Are there gains in efficiency with URP?
Or is it just the standard render with shadergraph?
I have some plugins that work in standard but not URP.
I eventually want to make a game for the switch.
Is URP more efficient?
Are unity going to drop support for the built in renderer?

Any answers would help.

Thank you,

--Joshua

 

1 - URP is basically unmodifable. To modify URP you need to copy it to asset folder.
2 - You get stucked with Shader Graph. If you need some non standard feature in shader, that you can't do in graph, you need to copy-paste whole URP shader library mess and just then modify it. And be aware - artists be hardly refuse custom shaders because of shader graph.

 

I strongly suggest starting with URP:

• native shadergraph
• native vfx graph
• support for DOTS/accelerated rendering
• visual interface for doing passes like stencil masking without code
• camera stacking without code
• replaces built-in renderer

It can do pretty much everything better than builtin and does so at higher performance. I will never, ever use builtin ever again.

If you want to push quality higher and performance lower, URP will not let you but builtin will let you. Builtin can do deferred lights but this is coming to URP anyway. At this point you should look at using HDRP instead if you are doing high end visuals.

That's just my opinion though.


Unity will eventually drop support for builtin and URP is faster across the board than builtin. In fact, Unity considers it a bug if URP is ever slower and will fix it pronto so it isn't.

 

URP is still incomplete in some ways - custom post processing is only available via PPv2 integration, there is no point light shadows (yet), no deferred (yet), no AO (yet - should arrive soon I think).
But if you plan to release your game in say 6 months from now or later, I would go with URP, as hippo said, it's better in a lot of ways and way more performant. Also standard will not receive any updates anymore.

 

URP is also severely under-documented. If you end up needing to do anything that Unity's own URP demos don't, your only avenue is hunting for forum posts, tweets, and trying to understand the package source code.

Since you self labeled a newbie, URP is more "plug-and-play". You'll just have to live with the things it doesn't do (or keep upgrading your project to every new Unity release to get the new features, since they aren't backported).

I keep hearing that, but I'm still waiting for actual benchmarks showing that. Mobile VR developers on the URP forum would strongly disagree with your "across the board" qualifier.

 

I am a VR developer, on Quest and up.

You can still use builtin's shaders providing they have custom lighting (vert/frag not surface). You can also see that FFR has been unavailable in Unity and it's actually Oculus' responsibly to implement this.

Likely, the people complaining have been using lighter shaders and not using an equivalent on the URP side, and invoking the Oculus library's FFR.

In any case I've tried game scenes with URP lit set to 4 lights without FFR. The Quest did not drop frames.

So I think otherwise.

 

I wish I could make a decision. Shader graph is so awesome, but I cannot get the smooth frame rate. All my 60FPS GearVR LWRP projects are sludging at 50FPS and under on Quest. I think Quest has a higher resolution and doesn't operate as well as phones. On Quest, I managed to hit 72FPS consistently as long as poly count was extremely low. As soon as some pre-instantiated ridged bodies were set to visible frames dropped quickly. I'd like to know whether to keep using the awesome sahder graph and hope performance increases with updates, but I may just have to go backwards and even learn how to write shaders.

 

From my experience URP is definitely not more performant than Builtin in. There are numerous threads discussing this. Currently I am facing an issue with post processing regression detailed in this thread https://forum.unity.com/threads/per...ions-of-unity-post-processing-and-srp.786944/ the issue tracker shows no movement and right now even on the most high end mobile devices the performance hit is a serious problem. I would suggest running some basic profiling tests before making a decision.

 

I find Shader graph harder to use compare to shaderforge or ASE. I would not recoment it to someone.

 

no SRP batching support for Sprite Shader..

 

I can vouch for the performance as well. I used this in a VR project (PC, can't speak for mobile) while a go, and got a significant performance increase with much better quality.

It can be a pain in the rear at times though but this is mainly because of third party assets. Even the ones that do support URP may have issues. But it think its just matter of time that URP will be the new 'standard'.

 

I want to use URP for my VR project, but I need volumetric lighting and fog. Since, these are available on HDRP and built-in, I'm leaning towards those two pipelines over URP. Have any of you come across a good volumetric solution in URP?

 

I cannot guarantee that this is correct now, but I read this sometime:

The reason why URP is sometimes slower with mobile or VR is that URP by default has activated more features than Build in. Build in automatically deactivates features for mobile / VR platforms, while URP does not. You have to adjust URP for your target platform.

 

I have seen the HDRP volume light and fog, it is just amazing and there is nothing I can compare it to in VR, I really wish this was available for URP also. But the next best I have seen/used is older version of this:https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...n-camera-effects/volumetric-fog-mist-2-162694

I haven't used the new one yet but it might be better than the old one. All their assets are very light weight and very performant so it is a plus.

 

Any news on URP about the support of these limitations?

1. No realtime point light shadows
2. No Ambient Occlusion post processing

 

I ... like even forgot how long the first request was.. I .. actually even forgot that these were not yet supported. That is how long this was.. I wonder how things are at the moment.

 

Ambient Occlusion is available in the 2020.2 beta (apparently, I haven't moved to the beta yet). The main thread about that is over here.

Real-time point lights is a sadder story, it looks like it's only arriving in 2021.1 at the earliest, according to the soon-to-be published What's New in URP 10.0 docs, which is for 2020.2 and has nothing about real-time point lights in it.

 

So far i know it is already in 10, but not active.

 

Exactly if you have the graphics repository you can already test realtime point light shadow but it's heavy as in Built-in pipeline

 

Apparently the point light shadows work pretty much the same as in built-in, but with actual filtering, and it seems there are no fancy performance features and shadows update every frame for every camera. Makes one wonder why it took so long if they implemented it in such a barebones fashion.

 

It's typical for Unity to spend years to eventually reach the exact same spot they were.

 

They should have released way back when they started with LWRP
No improvement at all and the discussion on GitHub state that performance is almost on par with built-in, I don't understand why they took 2 years of "research"

 

Before actually developing with URP you should make completely sure it supports all needed rendering features and customizations. URP is still limited in terms of built-in rendering features. So if you needed all features the formerly built-in graphics offers, forget about URP. It just makes your life harder and you may have purchase tons of assets again, if they have URP support at all. Also regarding assets, a new expensive trend is that asset store creators charge you to pay twice, separate licences for HDRP and URP. So you better know which pipeline you want to use.

It all depends on the nature of your game. For example a game with real time global illumination is not possible with vanilla URP. So if you ask, how to scale one game project from mobile to PC, just with URP? Well, it's the lighting should be dynamic and good, you're out of luck. But a baked lighting solution for Switch might suit your needs.

And don't let Unity marketing with their URP boat demo fool you. Yes, the water looks good for URP. But it requires heavy customization. Just look at the source code in order to understand what developing for URP really is.

You can compare the latest features with this official table: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...l/universalrp-builtin-feature-comparison.html

 

Completely agree. I've been using URP for a project recently and it's been a slow and time consuming process getting it to work properly
Many of the assets still don't support it and even ones that do don't support it completely. Why? because URP itself is not feature complete or stable yet. Considering the slow progress so far It'll probably be a year before before it gets to the level of the built-in renderer and that's probably going to be a Beta build so you'll have to wait for the production release which will be another 3-5 months.
I'm guessing that URP will only be production ready in 2022 so might be better to plan accordingly

BTW for anyone not aware yet there's a public roadmap for URP where you can vote or request for new features so please cast your votes and maybe that will make a difference https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-graphics/tabs/3-universal-render-pipeline

 

Where can I find the code for the Universal Render Pipeline/Lit shader? I am just learning Unity and was watching a video

teaching me how to change the color of an object and he shows (at 01:10 in video) how to download the Unity archive with the shader code to find the name of the variable to update but he is using the standard shader and I am using Universal Render Pipeline/Lit. I cannot figure out which file corresponds to the Universal Render Pipeline/Lit, or perhaps it is in a different place altogether. There was a followup post that tells me to set "_BaseColor" and that works fine but I would like to understand where that comes from. Thank you.

 

In the github repository:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/tree/master/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal

You can find the files under the

Shaders

and

ShaderLibrary

directories.

 

if you just want the names to poke at them with c# you don't need to bother with the shaders files, simply switch the inspector panel to debug (top right corner) and all the internal names will appear in the material

 

Thanks, Peter.

 

Great tip, laurentlavigne, Thanks.

 

I can't get over how terrible the shadows are in URP. They are shockingly bad in comparison to the built in.

The built-in has a bug with Post-Processing that was ticketed almost 2 years ago which makes it super annoying to work with. Doesn't look like Unity has any plans to fix it.

 

We are on the end of the graphics from technical side. Unity must focus on Art tools instead of renaming the technical design
URP and HDRP are just a renamed technology

In standard pipeline you can get URP setting with few clicks and Quickly get HDRP settings with few clicks again without performance lost

You can get higher performance in standard pipeline compare to the URP with proper settings

Also you can get higher visuals in standard compare to the HDRP with proper settings

Unity tools are not comparable to asset stores tools like Amplify Shader Editor and terrain shaders

URP & HDRP are just time wasting

Unity has evolved from technical side and must hire artist employees something that is in UE and Cry Engine

 

This really doesn't make sense. While everyone would me more than happy to have more artist oriented tools in the engine, you can't ignore the rendering side.

Rendering technology is evolving constantly and built-in is based on old concepts and you can't just keep hacking stuff together.

We're using URP extensively and, while there are some limitations, we're amazed by how well it performs especially on limited hardware like mobile.

 

There are problems that make the work harder every day in the newer versions
Unity 5 removed beast lightmapper that make mobile development impossible in some sort of the games for few years(bake into prefab, bake using low-end hardware like notebooks, bake 10x faster, bake result is 100 similar to the realtime lighting look, bake into transparent surface, bake normal maps ...)

Now URP and HDRP have created some new unacceptable problems:
- No proper terrain and foliage shaders
- Low fps on HDRP
- No clean support for custom post processing ...
- Very hard to balance light settings (ambient light + sun light + post processing exposure)

We are back to the past and we have to wait another few years for these simple problems to be solved

Art is the main part of game making, and in other game engines you see that everything is based on art

As you can see, in Unreal Engine 5 they only used the scanned scene to introduce the new generation, not the new important technical effects.

 

Yes... I wonder where the art comes from for all of Unity's film quality tech demos? Perhaps from the trees in the book of the dead or perhaps from baldy's special magic suitcase in the heretic.

Granted, some are outsourced but Unity does have access to all the top-tier artists they could need.

Er, nanite and lumens are a massive game changer in technology, without the art could not actually work. It's texture to geometry with optional support for meshlets and the like. It's in fact really, really good technology that scales really well since you can bake out meshes from any detail level pretty much instantly for any target platform. They even use 2 compute shaders to cut down on the micro triangle problem. All this with a setup where the artist no longer needs to care about budgets, just how things look.

That's a massive leap in technology and artist tooling.

 

When you add an effect to the camera in Unity, you don't see any art in it
But in UE and Cry, when you add the same effect, it is set in the best and most artistic way possible in settings
The same goes for Vray and others

You see the best settings and quality in Unity demos, but when you create something in Unity yourself, the default settings are at their worst and no art is used in them. Because no artist was present there
100% of the default settings are made by programmers and not artists. But in Vray a amateur user can get the best result with few clicks by default. Unreal has same thing. The beast lightmapper had same thing. Best result by default

None of these amazing technologies are seen in Unity by default
For example tessellation is a game changer for terrain system but cant see in the unity's terrain system
Dynamic GI was a game changer in Cry Engine but we cant see in unity by default
SSR was a game changer in 2012 games but we can see inside unity since 2015-2016 with a lot of bugs
Now Er, nanite and lumens are coming and we can see 5-10 years later inside unity out of the box

But from technical side, we can see latest DirectX and Color Space inside unity at the release time. Latest .net framework, latest platform SDKs

Because we have the best programmers in Unity ,all SDKs are updated or added in the fastest time
But we have the best artists in UE and Cry and the latest effects are added and updated quickly with the best default settings in performance and quality
This is what I'm talking about

These are the things we see everyday on Unity blog and its web main page :
- The latest .net frame work added
- The latest C# compiler added
- The latest physics sdk added
- the latest android sdk added
- A new platform added

And these are the things we see on the front page of other engines:
- The most up-to-date effects added
- The latest artistic tools added
- The latest cinematic tools added

Of course, I know that a lot of new effects are being made by the Unity team in HDRP, and I appreciate that

 

But if you were building a stencil portal scene, and have decided to use shadergraph - you would have to render everything twice - am I right?
In the standard builtin render pipeline you can put the stencil directives into the subshader blocks, in URP (and shadergraph) you would have to use RenderObjects to set the stencils, what means rendering objects a second time.
Of course you could also edit an URP scripted shader, adding the stencil code to it.

 

And what about all the people who say that are getting lower performances on URP compare to BuiltIn?
I'm just asking and not attacking, we are working on a Scarlet/PS5 game and we are still discussing if moving or not to URP.

 

I guess it all depends on when your game is expected to be shipped and how long you would like to patch/update support. Builtin is supposed to be discontinued, so in our case, we feel like we have no choice if we want to keep supporting the game using the recent version of the Unity in the future... with bite of salt in our mouth, knowing the urp and 2drenderer is still, in "development". And it has been like this for very long time.

 

I've tested urp for a terrain scene and other nice effects. Works great with adreno gpu vulkan api. But seem to have bug with urp default post processing for powerVR devices using same vulkan api and same scene.

So now switched back to standard as I found this pipeline to be more stable and feel more liberal as support for 3rd party asset is huge as compared to urp. Now can use deferred rendering on mobile again.

But I experienced an improvement for shadow and light map. In urp shadow are more beautiful and performative than actual real-time shadow in built in. Because with standard I see 50-60 shadowcasters in stats but for same scene in urp. There is 0 shadowcaster yet still I'm having a shadow for my character and other objects like trees. Is it some kind of bug ? I wish if urp support other gpu more I wouldn't switched back to standard at all.

 

On such powerful hardware there is no need for URP. URP is for when that (humble) 20% speedup allows you to hit target framerate.

 

The game is also supposed to run on Switch, otherwise I would have never considered SRP

 

sorry to hear that
URP ain't that bad, when you turn off shadows, switch off realtime lighting and make your own shaders you can get some amazing speed. Just double whatever estimate you have about getting this thing running properly because it is full of weirds.

 

PS5 is fast and I struggle to imagine a scenario but 8k might actually work well with SRP and some custom code. Hard to say really if it's all or nothing.

Sometimes SRP is about control too and HDRP may be too much for the amount of modification it requires for some things.

 

Hi. Sort of late to the party of this post but, I got intrigued by this, specially the "at a higher performance" part:

So, I created 2 projects to sort of have benchmarking about it in a Standalone Build for the PC. One project using Built-In pipeline and the other using URP. Same scene in both projects with the exact same elements and everything. Shaders are "Standard", nothing custom or "rare". The purpose of doing that was because I'm about to start a new project and I was undecided if I should use Built-In or to switch to URP.

Main elements in the scenes:
- Dungeon scene
- A combination of Baked lights and Real-Time lights(these ones attached to particles and to the characters)
- Small fog elements in some corridors
- Using Unity's fog (Lightning->Scene settings)
- 3 characters running an idle loop animation (each one with a real-time light on top, with culling mask to only affect the characters and the floor)
- A script that fires 3 different projectiles using particles and the real time lights mentioned above. Those projectiles are fired every X amount of seconds (spamming them: @ 0.65s, 0.75s and 1.4s).
- For URP, camera is not using any post-processing

So pretty much the setup was to test an "average" scene of my possible game using Built-In vs URP (Low Quality settings)
Long story short, these are the results (averages, FPS=Frames per Second, higher is better).
I'm using Grapphy to measure the FPS, I hope it's a reliable tool:

Basic scene (no characters, no projectiles, just the Static objects with baked lights, the small fog elements/particles and Unity's fog):
Built-In: 838
URP: 384

Scene with Projectiles (Same as basic scene plus the script active to spam projectiles with real time lights attached):
Built-In: 462
URP: 163

Scene with Projectiles and Characters (Full scene) (worth nothing, when characters in the scene, one of the projectiles impacts a character, making its real-time light to travel a shorter distance, hence fewer processing):
Built-In: 405
URP: 176

The quality is the "same", just with a slight difference with lights, because URP processes lights differently, resulting in a minimal variation in intensity.

So, as you can see, and without tweaking anything, Built-In had way better performance than URP out of the box. So not sure what kind of tests you did to conclude that URP had better performance.

The tests were performed on a middle-end PC in HD resolution (1920x1080).

 

Built-in and URP out of the box have different settings, you can't really compare them this way.
In our experience, on all kind of platforms (from mobile to PS5), URP is always faster.

 

Well, now that you have worked with that, can you share some of that wisdom/experience in the terms of what would be the first approach to make the URP project to perform at least as the Built-In one?
Because in the documentation and also based on topics/tutorials online, the first thing to do is to go for lower settings, disable any post and adjust the shaders to have similar basic properties as built-in, and that's what I did and those were the results.

Thanks.

 

Technically, the URP is no different from Built-in
This is exactly the Built-in with only the lowest possible settings and certain limitations
I don't think it is wise to leave the Built-in pipeline with the highest features and work with a limited URP without any difference

 

Technically URP is supposed to be better since it has less features and functions yet it is not! Graphics look worse on it and not to mention that some pps are broken and make it even worse visually then the standard rp

 

Yes when you switch to the mobile build in standard rp, you can see URP in standard pipeline

 

Funnily enough, I've noticed that when somebody claims that URP is "faster" than standard, they usually defend the faster thing without real proof cuz most likely they didn't compare it and they never provide advice/tips on how they did it. I bet this will go unanswered in this thread as well.

And yeah, I landed on this thread so excited to finally know a conclusive answer because I kinda reached the same results that for an average non-realistic type of game, standard/built-in was faster than URP

Not being mean about your tests but, you provided the numbers about frames you got on your different scenarios, detailing the aspects of them which is rare around here but, maybe you should provide more of the results in a video or something, cuz that might encourage them to help or provide guidance.