When will Linear Color Space be available for Mobile Platforms?

I'm targeting high-end / future mobile hardware (eg, shield console w/ Tegra X1) and honestly right now Unity isn't even an option due to lack of linear color space.

UE4 does linear on mobile, looks amazing. So what's up Unity? Could you provide any information regarding your plans for linear on mobile?

 

I also see 5.1 added support for opengl ES 3.1 + AEP, that's awesome! Hopefully linear will be available on mobile at some point in the near future?

 

I noticed in this "Lighting and Rendering" Learn page, it states:

This seems incorrect - Unity does not support linear color space on mobile hardware whatsoever, as far as I can tell. I have a Shield Tablet / Tegra K1, as well as Shield Console / Tegra X1, linear does not work...

Can anyone please chime in on this issue... thanks

 

If linear isn't available on the devices you mention then your best bet is to report it as a bug via the built in bug reporter. At least that way you can be sure it will be seen by UT and maybe enter a dialog as to why its not available. Reporting on the forums is very hit and miss as to whether anyone from Unity will respond or even see the post.

 

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for good looking lighting on mobile platforms.

I created this feedback, please vote for it!
http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/linear-space-lighting-support-on-mobile-platforms

It would be doable on "unsupported" devices by adding a few instructions within the shaders itself, replacing texture read and write at pre-compilation, this would make linear lighting works on more hardwares.

 

Not to most mobile developers. Remember that most mobile devs are targeting iPhone 4S/5 level hardware.

Many of us are still using lightmaps (and mourning the loss of Beast), per-vertex lights, and/or lightprobes. Per pixel pass-per-light lighting is still very costly. All the new shiny new graphics features in Unity 5 - completely useless to most real-world mobile developers, at least for now. Maybe in 3-5 years some of it will be viable in real-world games?

In my opinion, Unity are focusing too heavily on these high-end graphics features. I suspect that it's mobile developers - mostly targetting mid-range devices - who are Unity's main source of revenue?

But personally, I'm wondering how much more power the next iPhone will bring. Remember that the iPhone 6 isn't a whole lot faster than the 5S. We may be reaching the end of the recent period in which we could expect a 2-4x increase in mobile GPU performance every year. There's a limit to what's practical with a small battery and passive cooling...

 

@bluescr

Yes I agree that the PBR pipeline and complex real time lighting is not yet usable on mobile games targeting the mass market. I'm pretty sure someone could find a niche with more high end games or for various android devices and with clever tricks, one could do massive optimizations to use more advanced effects, even on older hardwares.

Linear space pipeline can still bring better graphics for much simpler pipelines. I worked on a project where I used beast lightmaps computed in linear space on mobile + simple lighting. I had modify the default unity shaders for this. It looked much more realistic and it was running fine on older devices. Having native support for linear space lighting would have simplified this process a lot.

 

There is hardware available, today, that can do this on mobile without active cooling:

That is on my SHIELD console, but shield tablet can run it as well (no active cooling on the tablet). Mobile graphics capabilities are still increasing at a ridiculous rate, they are projected to exceed the power of consoles in a few years. By the time xbox one and ps4 are getting towards end of life, there will probably be tegra chips etc that are in the same ballpark. (said chips might not necessarily be in a phone - like tegra K1 and X1 are only in high-end tablets and devices like nvidia shield console, shield handheld, etc)

The lines between mobile and desktop/console are already beginning to blur. For anyone targeting "next-gen" mobile using PBR, Unity is currently not an option...

 

one month later


zzzzzzzz

 

Have you checked the newly released public road map?

 

No, I am not currently using unity. What are you getting at?

 

I'm getting at - if your looking for a specific feature to be implemented in the future - check the road map to see if it's on the horizon.

 

bumpppp

 

please vote for this here guys: https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/linear-space-lighting-support-on-mobile-platforms