Who is using HDRP in production?

Blacksad is not using HDRP based on game files.
Although, road 96 does use HDRP (and unity 2020 LTS) and it seems to have a switch version, custom work I suppose.

 

Ah, that's correct, maybe it's just built in plus PPv2.

 

Can't thank you enough for this little gripe and quirk list.

Will continue to avoid 2020.LTS until I'm ready to publish. That 45% play testing time increase and performance drop is yuk.

Cheers


To OP's point:

Am not using HDRP. Don't know of any games using it. Do know of several that have reverted to Builtin.

Personally, reverted from URP to Builtin.

Used to test URP and HDRP with each major update. Now spending spare time learning old Builtin Shaders and other older, well documented tricks.

@dgoyette VERY IMPRESSIVE that Gravia!!!

And the concept... who doesn't love Portals!!!

 

Thanks for sharing these. I had no idea shipbreaker was HDRP, this is definitely giving HDRP vote of confidence.

 

I've worked on several projects that shipped with HDRP - Most were 6DOF PCVR film with volumetric actors.

The Changing Same: Episode 1


Queerskins: ARK


Also made some virtual production tools and VFX for rendering out of HDRP scenes for the flat film Truth or Consequences.


Working on other new projects w HDRP too.

 

All of these are really awesome! Please keep sharing.

Has anyone done a VR (PCVR) game using HDRP? Last I tried it, while graphics were simply amazing, it was pretty slow, ended up using URP and that is working fine. However, I would like to have an HDRP version of this at some point in the future.

 

I'm currently working on Brinefall in Unity 2020.3 HDRP. My vertical slice is almost finished and I'm confident I will release the game either at the end of 2021 or early 2022.

My game is a sandbox open-world (20Km x 20Km) and I have a steady 50 / 60 fps at all times which is good considering I barely started the optimization.

 

Very nice. Can I ask what vegetation system are you using ?

 

Thanks!

I use The Vegetation Engine along with Vegetation Studio Pro.

 

That is surprising may I ask why both ? They supposed to do the same things right ?

 

Not really, they complete well each other.
The Vegetation Engine is mostly a great shader for the vegetation and to control how they behave (wind, wetness etc) while Vegetation Studio Pro is mostly a biome and vegetation placement tool while also taking care of the vegetation performance.

 

I am... the quality of the light is much better than built-in, but has a lot of trade offs. The largest problem is really the memory footprint and size of the builds. Unity has very poor material management in storage and build, so HDRP compounds it. This is because for HDRP to look good, you have to use multiple 4K textures in a material. Even with crunch compression, it still chews a lot of space. I believe the ideal use for Unity HDRP is really something that's either a one-off use case (like an archviz demo for a small group of people) or a low-poly stylized game where you can get away with 2k texture maps. If you're using it for anything other than that, your player base needs a gaming rig that's post 2017 to really get good performance from HDRP. Had I to "choose over" I would have stuck with built-in and just used a bunch of volumetric light and VFX assets to make it look like HDRP. You can still get a AAA-looking game without moving to HDRP, which again, is what I should have stuck with. Overall, I feel that moving to HDRP wasted my time and was a mistake.

 

Looks mint.

 

not certain if you traced the problem yet

if your project has many complex shaders and "Asynchronous Shader Compilation" is disabled unity can crash when first opening a large scene.. it is common to turn this setting off when working on projects as the editor runs slower but could be something you may wish to re enable before build ...


other than this I had no issues working in HDRP
Note i do not use anything below api 10.4.0 or lower
anything below 10x may be extremely problematic depending on what platform you will target for your final build

cheers

 

There's virtual texture support for HDRP. You could use it to reduce the memory footprint.

 

wait Car Mechanic Sims was using unity and HDRP? wow. . . i thought it was UE

 

Yeah, but like everything else in Unity, it has a compatibility list that excludes a lot of things. The main one is it excludes crunch compression. So your build size goes up to 40GB instead of 10GB.... This is the eternal seesaw of Unity and why I'm fed up with it. Turn this on, break that... Don't mind me, I'm just salty because I'm at the end of my rope with HDRP and Unity, it's a cool suggestion.

 

HDRP is meant for high-end devices and as long as you tend to stick to what it was designed for I think you would be ok. 40GB would be an extreme case. However, disk space is less of a problem with PC games, and unless you are doing a huge project with all 4k textures, it will be far less than 40GB. To my understanding, HDRP prepacks/loads all resources, which guarantee (at least in theory) your desired frame-rate for the target platform.

I definitely do understand your frustration (to say frustrated is an understatement!), I deal with similar things in URP. However, I like to keep an open mind when it comes to technologies. I try to to be logical, almost to a robotic level, so that I don't let my feelings/frustrations get in the way. These are just tools to work with and you have to find the right tool for the right task.

 

In general that's true... From a player perspective, my steam playtest has had its run ins with players who can't run the game because their hardware is too old (machines older than 5 years). What I've found is that anyone with anything less than a GTX 1070 gets lower than 30fps and anything less than an SSD drive takes more than a minute to load. So my minimum specs are 16GB of memory, an SSD, and a GTX 1070 or higher.

From a developer perspective, I've been dogged by shader problems with HDRP leaps, (v7 to v10) wrecked a lot of 3rd party shaders for visual effects, etc. Not so much on performance capabilities with HDRP overall, but Unity's haphazard methodology of relying on asset store developers to deliver on things Unity should be making themselves. Instead, Unity is on this kick to make tools no one asks for in the community or really needs (LookDev studio as an example).

 

I mean, from a perspective of video card life, gtx 1070 is an old video card too, came out in 2016. For a new high quality game that is coming out today, min requirement of 1070 is reasonable to me.

However, 30 seems low but it could be due to many reasons. What exact video cards? How much memory and what is the speed? also what quality setting? shadows on or off? I'd start gathering specifics. With computers, you really should not be guessing and wondering, remember they are either on or off .

Then the best thing to do to figure this out is run the profiler on one of those machines. That would tell you what the cause is. Btw. Is this a VR game?

Load times you described are pretty common to all games, including non Unity. I don't think this is unique to HDRP. You would be very lucky if you can load a reasonable size game (Unity or otherwise) in less than 2 mins on a non SSD.

One thing you can do is, consider a URP build for lower-end devices. You know, like an HD version and non HD version. Yes it is more work but hey welcome to game dev

I really wish Unity had one pipeline with modules we can turn on and off, like how HDRP is but take it all the way down to low-URP levels, I am not sure why they needed to go separate systems. But here we are... not much we can do about it now but to adapt, or use a different engine like UE.

 

I played road 96 and mechanical simulator 2021, both (especially the latter) are high graphics and look really good, open and the former open world and big.

They use HDRP.
Getting +75~ FPS avg on both, GTX 1070 laptop. Everything's on high/ultra.

 

Personally I'd avoid HDRP if possible, I have to have the Task Manager open due to how often the editor crashes so I can quickly get it back open and back to work, unfortunately I need it for the lighting (game map has indoor and outdoor areas) and you'll also take a hefty FPS hit as well.

 

What unity version? Never faced this issue.

 

Unity crashes all the time for me, twice a day at a minimum. Very often locks up for minutes. I am on URP. I think this has to do with the editor version 2020.

 

I totally get what you're saying, I mean my game is okay performance on "older" hardware and is fine on newer hardware. Steam players though, don't really look at hardware requirements, that's not a Unity problem through.

Anyway, I'm not really complaining about that at all. What I am disappointed in, is the way Unity has approached the development process for HDRP and how they're treating solo indie game developers from a marketing perspective. If anyone is trying to make a AAA style game in the style and playability mechanics like Uncharted for example, you're really hard pressed to do that in Unity whereas Unreal is more situated for a modern game.

Unity consistently pushes developers to the asset store, which is fine, but a lot of the add-ons there aren't really performant, so you're spending a lot of time to make them performant. Also, for HDRP, native shaders with Unity are really lackluster for what they're attempting to do. If you want anything custom like oh say Water, Hair, Smoke/Fire, Skin, etc you're more than likely going to be either A) spending a lot of time building it yourself or B) getting it from the asset store.

Unity showcases things like Adam, Book of the Dead, or The Heretic and show off new bleeding edge technologies that hardly anyone can use or replicate in production. They're all one-off very difficult to use and custom made tools for a specific use. The digital human package for example is terrible and not extensible with any workflow tools that indie artists are using for character design or development.

Overall, my point is really that Unity has lost its way and they're off on some tangent and constantly developing Add-ons that either aren't for HDRP (Photo Mode tool) or that no one asked for or needs (LookDev studio) or just so far behind in development, no one cares about (DOTS). Maddeningly, they're off on this vision quest for developing things for small film studio type productions, which I don't see anyone really flocking to use anyway. The bread & butter for unity has always been in providing a platform for solo indiegame developers, which they seem to be ignoring for the better part of the last 3 years. At Unite, they're consistently saying "We hear you..." yet their actions remain the same.

(Update: Unity added a native Hair shader in 2020.3.17f1)

 

2021.1.9f1

SIGSEV errors when entering/exiting play mode, likely culprit is 3rd party DLL's, a known issue with Unity, not expected to be fixed anytime soon.

The project is nearly 200GB with over 5000 c# files so I suspect most users will never experience these issues unless they decide to make a big game.

I'm just glad I'm not using DX12 at the moment as that has been even more unstable in test projects but to Unitys credit they are currently fixing it.

 

As an employee of an animated video service. May I know this technology will be suitable for us or not?

 

Depends what quality you're looking for, if AAA game level quality is acceptable then yes, otherwise you're better off using Blender etc. to get hollywood cgi movie grade quality.

 

Probably not... Unity HDRP doesn't have a very good method for high poly model support or global illumination. The ray tracing they talk about is super experimental, there's a bunch of caveats that they highlight that don't work with it. Mandalorean and Expanse used Unreal engine as an example.

Characters and models often look flat unless you use photogrammetry with 4k textures with light probes & reflection probes, which frankly have a huge cost, so unity is always suggests baking light. The GPU light mapper always seems to fall back to CPU as it's buggy, which means looking at the 3rd party solutions, which is something Unity should be doing 100x better internally. I really wish I could get behind HDRP, it's lighting & material support is getting better, but really, it doesn't measure up to the light quality they've enhanced in Unreal.

 

@markdigi1

Raytracing isn't that experimental, Lego Builders did their raytraced game on a 2019 version of unity. And one of the devs said nothing but compliments to the raytracing state in HDRP.

Raytracing in HDRP is also better than Unreal in terms of performance and denoiser. The denoiser is far superior. Much cleaner result.
It seems unreal doesn't care much for fully raytraced GI, and are replacing it with lumen.

If you can't use raytracing GI, you still have Enlighten which is coming back in 2021.2, it's not a perfect solution -- but it works for realtime global illumination and gives good visuals & performance.

To top it off, you'll also have Screen Space global Illumination. Which has major improvements in 2021.2 -- but obviously comes with screen-space limitations.

If you're doing animation work and got a beefy computer, HDRP is more than capable and is a good choice. Just use Raytracing for your global illumination. Much better than lumen and all it's artifacts and problems, you don't need the realtime performance after all.

High poly model support 'nanite' is nice, but it's about the same when you use normal maps in terms of visuals. Slight improvement but that's about of it. The rest of it becomes an improvement to workflow since you don't need LODs (which are easy and fast to make if automated), and no normal maps.

Unity and unreal were both used in many movies/tv shows.
Mandalorian also dropped UE soon after using it for a different solution.

Choose your engine based on what you prefer, for your purpose (here being animations)
Do you like the node/blueprint system of unreal engine? or
Do you like the menu/drag and drop editor customizability system of unity?
Which UI do you prefer? Which tools do you prefer? (You probably will use unity recorder, cinemachine, timeline) and if you were using unreal, you'd use their equivalent.
Which 'look' do you prefer? I personally dislike the unreal look and find it extremely hard to remove unless you're a _big_ studio.

This Animation was made with a normal version of HDRP. No special graphic tooling.

A very old version, 2019.
I don't think they used raytracing, but i'm not sure.

 

Go ahead, turn on raytracing.

• Does not support vertex animation.
• Does not support decals.
• Does not support tessellation.
• Does not support per pixel displacement (parallax occlusion mapping, height map, depth offset).
• Does not support VFX and Terrain.
• Does not have accurate culling for shadows, you may experience missing shadows in the ray traced effects.
• Does not support MSAA.
• Does not support Graphics.DrawMesh.
• Ray tracing is not supported when rendering Reflection Probes.
• HDRP does not support orthographic projection. If you enable orthographic projection mode, you might experience rendering problems for Transparent Materials, volumetrics and planar reflections.
  
  So yeah, it's good for legos.

 

Almost every single one of these is simply not "raytraced", it's still supported and there. Just falls back to the rasterized version.

Seriously, how is that even close to being a deal breaker to animation(any project)? or as you put it
'super experimental'
And for the most part, you'd mostly care about raytraced GI. Which works just fine, with a much better denoiser than alternative engine implementations.

 

I’ve started using HDRP for pre-rendered cinematic videos where I’m using a combination of Timeline, Cinemachine and Recorder to render out my scenes into image sequences which are then put into After Effects for post work.

Performance isn’t an issue for me as my final product is being rendered out at run time.

Issues I run into include (but not limited to HDRP):

1. Not artist friendly, you are very limited if you don’t know how to code (this is making me look at Unreal more and more for my pre-rendered cinematic needs)
2. Lack of built in features (too much reliance on third party Unity Store assets which can go away if the developer decides to quit updating)
3. Not enough tutorials on HDRP

 

Unfortunately Unity's raytracing CPU code completely falls apart in non-trivial scenes, because it was written as a feature demo in isolation (like many of Unity's bullet-point features in the past 5 years) without accounting for real-world large scale projects. Luckily Lego Builders has a very small scene so it works out for that specific project. Anything bigger is not viable though.

Judge for yourself whether this is acceptable for anything outside of a demo. This function is run every frame per camera. https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...peline/Raytracing/HDRaytracingManager.cs#L346

Calling FindObjectsOfType<LODGroup>() every frame would not pass code review in a serious project, not to mention the lack of complex instancing support (which itself is critical for large-scale projects) or the other missing features mentioned earlier. I don't blame Unity for having that code in a demo scenario, but I do blame them for marketing it as anything other than prototype code and not having a roadmap for when it will be shippable quality in large projects.

 

This one actually done by request because without processing LODs for ray tracing there are problems with ray traced shadows. Also, can't see performance drop after it was implemented - opposite of that, it's actually working faster thanks to using LODs for ray tracing instead of my super detailed LOD0...

 

The FindObjectsOfType (LODGroup and otherwise) calls existed both before and after the LOD selection code was added. In non-trivial scenes they create massive garbage-collected arrays every frame and do tons of CPU work that should not be done that way.

Rendering correct LODs instead of always LOD0 will speed up GPU processing but won't improve CPU performance, and it's CPU performance that has always been a disaster in non-trivial projects with Unity's HDRP ray tracing implementation. The RTAS code in general is structured exactly like I'd expect it to be done if someone were making a quick prototype without digging into Unity's own C++ culling and rendering code. Which, again, is fine for a prototype but it's not shippable for non-trivial projects, and the problem is Unity hasn't indicated they'll spend the effort to ditch that and do a proper integrated solution.

At the end of the day, I'm left with a ray tracing implementation from Unity that I can't ship in my project because the CPU code wasn't written to support non-trivial scenes. I'm lucky because I didn't make a whole project expecting ray tracing to work with it, but I feel bad for people who are on that path.

 

I wish we could have HDRP's lighting in built-in without the whole SRP hassle.

 

We use HDRP (2020 LTS) on quite a complex project which is launched (Synthetik 2)
Honestly HDRP is in good shape and causes basically no technical issues (but had quite the learning curve) but we are not doing any big custom rendering stuff with it and use what HDRP offers. The performance is good but could be better always of course but with some optimizations even the lower end people can play. Materials can sometimes break tho in git pushes and require a library delete, but that might be unity in general also. Being able to strip even more would be good for the low end people.

Make sure to get RichFX and Upgen, also enable bent normals in materials

We have most of our issues with non rendering unity features which are not HDRP related.




Pros:
- Lights, Decals, BRDF, micro shadows, automatic bent normals, volumetrics, materials, DOF all very nice
- Quite stable
- Performance is good although has a certain baseline cost that is not for potato laptops
- Hard to justify using URP when you get the same performance with DLSS but way more stuff
- Overall things look great, add a lumen equivalent to this and its a great package
- HDRP handles polygons extremely well and you can have quite a high amount of geometry
- Feels pretty "complete" even if some features are barebones "checking the list" like post FX

Things that leave to be desired:
- SSGI (havent tested the new) is almost doing no color bleeding at all and has no color bleed control, but some good AO sometimes, very inconsistent and no way to tweak. Extreme cost
Does almost nothing 90% of the time and we have very colored scenes
- Contact shadows don't look good in most cases and have no filtering
maybe our camera style. All these 3 post FX feel barebones and not very tested.
- One big issue tho is that DX12 is not production ready and still does significant performance decreases, so we are on DX11, as such raytracing is also non viable
- Color grading exclusive, either ACES or an LUT - thats a no go (get Beautify to fix)
- No easy way to create post FX as a non shader programmer
- No switch or mobile support is a major downside
- Things that go into DOF zones get blurred (particles flying above the railing into a cliff)
- There is a noticeable CPU overhead we can't really optimize. Many of our players are CPU bound actually.
- Learning curve
- Edit: seems that shaders can break quite often in the build pipeline, not sure if a HDRP issue

From my perspective:
- In the end it does 80% depend on artist skill how good it looks
- Also if you build for steam, why bother with URP if it dosnt even have decals, most people will never launch on switch either way. Unreal is beating HDRP due to lumen but completely stomping on URP / Built in.

 

Anyone any tests with the 2021 SSGI and such maybe?

 

We Were Here Forever - link
uses HDRP (I checked game files). Was just released today, looks pretty good

 

It does have decals.

 

...which don't support layer masks and thus affect all geometry all the time, making them borderline useless for what modern games mostly use decals for: environment art.

URP decals are only good for things like bullet holes, which are small and are unlikely to project over unwanted geometry.

 

I have mixed feelings about HDRP these days based on latest.

• CPU performance is not great.
• GPU performance is surprisingly good.
• Rendering alone, is slightly below UE4.
• Cannot get anything decent looking without DLSS
• DLSS is the single best thing in HDRP
• TAA upscale is better than FSR1.0 (We will see about FSR2)
• TAA in general is super bad.
• SSGI is horrible.
• DX12 is horrible.
• Raytracing is surprisingly not bad but not really ready as DX12 is just sinking.
• Culling is the same as built in, which I don't understand why they are not working on this.
• Lightmapping and GI in general is horrible.
• Cannot handle large scenes.
• Terrain is still 2010.
• Terrain tools -> I don't even understand why it exists...it is convoluted, buggy and most importantly has no features.
• Terrain performance is really really really..........bad. 9 chunks streaming (minimum to have it seamless) out of 16 for example, will still result in hiccups. The latest Terrain Demo uses 9 (I think? or was it 16) but performance is laughably bad. This is with Instancing on.
• Editor performance improved drastically in 2022.1, my guess is UIElements replacing editor UI did the trick. Love it but still needs feature parity.
• Water is still WIP.
• Cloud is here but not impressive but better than not having any.
• Decal performance is awesome, decal and light layers are awesome. But decal position can get messed up (floating point origin?). And I have to fix it every week or so. Strange. This one could be on my end.
• Materials are great, but still, metallic rendering is off. I can't say what exactly, but it is off...ever so slightly.
• Custom pass is great but lacks performance.
• VFX and Shadergraph integration is awesome.
• SRP batcher is great in theory but in reality, it is not needed. The performance impact/benefit is negligible.
• Instancing trumps SRP batcher.
• Point light and shadows are good, but performance wise, not so great.
• SSAO is not great. Just average.
• Volumetrics and SSS are very good.
• Screen space reflections are so primitive and should be skipped.
• SS Refraction is one of the best in the industry
• Flares are a bit old school - hard to make it look great.
• Exposure/bloom is very hard to keep under control.
• Emissive behind refracted transparent goes flashing like crazy.
• Delta time related stuff in HDRP is great. (This is just Unity and not HDRP specific)

But most importantly, I often ask myself if I should keep using HDRP or Unity in general.

 

was that with the Unity lit shader ..?
just have not noticed this yet

 

Create a transparent window like quad, and add refraction, make it blurry (frosted) by change some smoothness, then add a point light behind it. Now watch it strobe like crazy.

 

The terrain performance is not that bad!! But yes we need something new, more powerful, performant and next gen like the terrain which they showcased at SIGGRAPH 2021... Terrain tools has great painting and sculpting tools but the placement tools are just the same and very bad!! Terrain tools haven't been buggy for me??? The main reason for the terrain sample performing this bad is shadows!!! The shadow distance is set to 5000m-6000m by default and the grass is unnecessarily very dense!!

 

Terrain without shader graph support and without mesh blending is essentially useless, after months of thinking about all the unsatisfying options we now just do meshes with normal materials oldschool style ..

 

Maybe the metallic shader code is missing multiscattering compensation

 

I have to disagree mate.

1. Unity terrain is impossible to look good -> it is just old tech, 4 layer splat heightmap terrain. The only way to make it look good, is to hide it with foliage and environment.
2. But for some reason, it is much heavier than it should be. It is literally slower than a same sized mesh with foliage instanced. Period.
3. There is some old tech that uses quadtree/tessellation to determine the final mesh (I guess for performance?) but literally a simple mesh with 4 layers is better looking and faster.
4. The only advantage of terrain system is that it has a built in editor (not great), and that there are 3rd party assets built around it. But the more assets you add, the slower it gets.

For me, a modern terrain should have the following

• Tessellation as default.
• Spline for roads and rivers as default
• 20 layers before having performance impacts.
• Turning on and off (so streaming) should not have any performance impact.
• Culling and LOD support in both editor and runtime. Try spawning 25 terrains in editor and see why I say this.
• SS foliage shader that is instanced and be able to interact with objects
• Auto repeating (wrap mode)
• Procedural placement and texturing
• Built in system to center the game to origin to handle floating point issues.

Of which the built in terrain system achieves none.