Will LWRP/HDRP replace the built-in pipeline?

I’m about to start a new project with Unity, and with the addition of SRPs it became quite unclear what to choose to start with. The built-in pipeline is still there, but the new Shader graph only supports SRPs. This left me wondering whether the built-in renderer is going to be deprecated / dropped support for in the near future and I should choose an SRP (even if I am unsure if I actually need to customize the pipeline).
The HDRP looks great but is still experimental, while the LWRP looks like a stripped down version of the built-in, and I do not see any compelling reason to choose it, other than shader graph.
Any advice/information in this regard?

 

I'd say not sooner than ~10-15 years.

SRP's will probably come out of preview / experimental state in about a few years.
Then a few years to iron out all bugs and issues.

No idea for an actual timing, just my speculations.

I don't think it will happen while there's a large user base of it, so it might take even longer.

 

I bet the built-in pipeline will stay for a long time.

Check out Amplify Shader Editor if you're looking for a Shader Graph-like tool for the built-in pipeline.

 

The LWRP is already out of preview, and the HDRP is due out of preview by the end of the year.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/04/16/introducing-unity-2019-1/

 

HDRP is supposed to be out of preview in 2019.3. If they hit that goal, I'd expect the legacy renderer to be deprecated for 2020.1, then removed in 2020.3 or 2021.1.

Unity keeps around deprecated features a while which don't require ongoing maintenance, but I don't see the legacy renderer as fitting that category. They will probably want the headache of supporting the legacy renderer off their plate as soon as possible.

 

It took them forever to remove unityscript because it was still used in a lot of projects, just as the default pipeline is.

 

Yes and I expect the traditional pipeline to hang around for ages. Just without any love in terms of getting major new features. I already stopped using it but thats a luxury I have that many dont.

 

If they get the feature set on parity, the performance better or parity in all cases and have a good auto upgrade tool then I think the uptake of the new pipelines will be fairly swift

 

Thanks for the comments. I was mainly interested in knowing what their intentions are, if they plan to keep supporting/adding new features to the built-in pipeline so that it coexists with the SRPs, or they plan to drop it entirely sooner or later. Reading the comments and Shader graph only supporting the SRPs would suggest the latter, but they did not say anything officially. (I believe)
I wish they were a bit more clear on this point.

 

It's pretty early on still, so I imagine they're waiting to determine if/when deprecation for the builtin pipeline is viable, based on LWRP/HDRP/SRP adoption rates.

 

See this post from January 2018:

#248

 

Yeah, but that's just for new versions. Because of the LTS versions, it will still be around for a couple of years in terms of support and usage even when they remove it from a version in the future.

 

That said LTS releases won't receive new features either.

 

After a certain point, I don't really see that being too much of an issue. Through some bizarre miracle, the whole SRP system is simple enough that even I was able to pick up on how to do stuff with it. I think this is going to be more like the 4.6 UI situation than it is mecanim or enlighten.

 

Yes, the main reason I am in this thread is to emphasise prior information, especially the 'no new features' bit. The deprecation bit will be very slow I'm sure, so its not really of much interest to me at the moment, I'm sure Unity know what would happen if they tried to axe it too quickly.

But it still all needs saying to give people a fair idea of the likely future. To start with (ages ago) I think plenty of people were not sure if the scriptable render pipelines were just an exotic sideline for Unity, rather than where all the mainstream action is supposed to be going forwards. The future is in the pipelines, and I recommend people either start embracing them or start to consider the reasons why they cant embrace them yet, and how/when that might change.

 

I'm guessing the traditional pipeline will be phased out within 2-3 years probably. The HDRP will probably be out of preview within a year and the main option within 1.5 years. The traditional pipeline will probably be "deprecated" within 4 years or so, if not sooner. Just my guesses though.

To me it looks like the HDRP and LWRP are the future, and relatively quickly.

 

Here is a really stupid question for you guys.

So SRP is for mobile. Sounds good.

HDRP is for PCs.

However, I read that HDRP is for high end machines. So what if you have a PC but it is not high end but you do not want to use a mobile rendering pipeline.

Can HDRP be used in games that are not super photo realistic? We will be able to make games that look like Skyrim or games of that time period?

I figured the current built in would stay around for a while for those of us who did not need high fidelity but want more than a mobile rendering system would do for us.

Please do not laugh at me. lol

Edit: I have a high end machine but my customers, due to the niche, will probably not.

 

As I understand that, LWRP is not targeted to Mobile only. It's designed to execute faster on weaker hardware in general, due to a different/restricted feature-set than HDRP. You can still use LWRP on higher-end hardware, if you don't need the more advanced features.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...ine/wiki/Lightweight-Render-Pipeline-Overview

https://unity.com/lightweight-render-pipeline

HDRP is targeted to more powerful hardware, like PC, XboxOne and PS4 for example.

 

I wasn't a lot of projects. Only 3.6% of users had more than 20% of their project code as UnityScript.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/08/11/unityscripts-long-ride-off-into-the-sunset/

 

Yes, by the time it was removed that was the case. There were years before that where that was not exactly viable.

 

I doubt my terrains will handle a single pass shader. I definitely need more than the SRP.

So I wonder how a higher end machine is defined? What GPUs will be required with HDRP? We do all of our development check on laptops to make sure that a decent laptop with a dedicated card will work.

Just saying higher end machines or lower end machines does not really help me to understand. Right now, we are fine in both my fancy desktop with the rtx 2080ti and the 1070 laptop and the 1050ti laptop.

Are those considered high end? I would really like it to work on slightly lower end machines too.

Thanks, Peter!!

 

SRP stands for Scriptable Render Pipeline. Its the feature that is used to build these new graphics pipelines, such as the two Unity are doing, or ones people and companies may choose to make themselves.

The two Unity are doing are the Lightweight Pipeline (LWRP) and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).

Mostly I'm just saying this because I think you keep saying SRP when you actually mean LWRP, and that could cause much confusion. So please accept my apologies for this terminology lesson.

Technically, HDRP will work with a wide range of PC hardware. But just like the old built in Unity renderer, there is a difference between it working, and it being able to deliver your particular scenes, lighting etc at the framerate you need on a particular gpu & cpu. Just like any renderer, there are various settings which will affect performance, and things you can do that will make your scene either faster or slower on various hardware. Lots of HDRP features can be switched off entirely, or some can be cranked up or down to various extents, there are lots of choices that have performance implications.

For reasons of all the various flexibility in terms of settings, and variations between different peoples projects, its probably hard to give an exact guide as to where the realistic cutoff should with hardware. Take for example the HDRP documentation. When describing what HDRP is, its not that hard for them to state the platform requirements in terms of what features are required for HDRP to work at all. They put it like this:

( from https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@6.7/manual/index.html )

Since HDRP is still in preview we dont know whether performance improvements may come in some areas one day, although half the point of it is that it takes a modern, flexible and efficient approach towards high end realtime graphics. Sp some things are likely already as fast as they are going to be, but still who knows what the future holds and the system is certainly still evolving at the moment.

 

Oh yeah I should really have mentioned the big clue there when trying to guess the minimum spec that there is any point trying to use HDRP with.....

They have the intention of making HDRP work on higher-end mobile devices that have compute shader support one day. So that should give some sense of how far down the ranks of hardware power they hope it will scale to one day.

 

Absolutely no reason to apologize. I really appreciate the terminology lesson. Makes total sense and thanks so much. I feel much better about switching to HDRP in the future if necessary.

Thanks so much for taking time to explain this to me. Between you and Peter I understand now.

Appreciate this so much!!! Love this community and it reminds me why I love to to come here so often..not often enough anymore though.

 

Hello from Neon Challenge 3rd rank team

There's this piece of information from Unite Copenhagen 2019 Roadmap talk, please see the video at 37:26

It's a bit hard to hear exactly what she says (is that Arisa Scott?). I heard it as "Right now we haven't named it as legacy, so we're definitely going to wait for an LTS, we're definitely have a 19.4 LTS, and we're continuing to bugfix for the built-in render pipeline. And our goal is to make Universal become a kind of default replacement and so we're growing its feature set over the next year and we'd love to hear your feedback about what features might be missing for you."

It would be great if someone at Unity could clarify this a little bit. So, if I understood right, Builtin pipeline will not be named as legacy in 2019.4 LTS, but in one of the next LTS releases (eg 2020 LTS or 2021 LTS?)

Also a very important thing for anyone who is starting with the production of their game is if builtin pipeline is going to be supported for next-gen consoles like PS5? Our previous game started as a mobile game but has gained enough popularity to port it to PC, PS4 and Switch and it actually sold much better on those platforms. So you never know if you'll need to port your game, even if you don't plan it right now.

As for "we'd love to hear your feedback about what features might be missing for you". Where should I leave that kind of feedback for Arisa to see? We're using an asset "Fog Volume 3" by David Miranda (promoted by Unity), and we're using fog volumes to build parts of some of our levels, so those volumes are the actual building blocks of our gameplay environments at times. I have contacted David but he's unable to port Fog Volume 3 to new pipelines because it's impossible without the RenderWithShader functionality which is missing.

So we're just going forward with builtin and hope for it to be supported on PS5. And hoping is a bit scary at times

 

Whats exactly is involved in converting a scene into SRP, I know it involves redo lighting. How much can be scripted for existing scenes and so forth? (I had a scene that was configured wrong for indirect light, I corrected the light settings and then I scripted most of the reconfiguration of lights in the scene, could something similar be done for migrating from builtin) Sadly we have some assets that use amplify shaders, substance materials, are these easy to convert, etc.

For us quality of builtin is good enough, we would move because of getting better performance, the improved batching etc and to be able to upgrade Unity once builtin is deprecated. Also I hope SRP means we at some point can move away from baked lighting, because its a pain.

 

I fully expect the builtin pipeline to be supported at the beginning of the life of the console, since the release date of the next console is within the current roadmap of Unity, but keep in mind the lifespan of the console is typically around eight years. I fully expect the builtin pipeline to disappear before the console reaches its end of life.

Our team is currently working with HDRP, and while I'm not the developer responsible for bringing scenes into the new pipeline, to me it appears to be primarily a case of reworking the lighting, any custom shaders, and the post process.

 

It's usual for a game to be 3-4 years in production, LTS lasts 2 years so that's where the problem could arise for people who are currently in production. The new pipelines don't seem to be that ready and builtin doesn't have a clear future outlined so it's very hard to make a choice now.

As for eight years, I don't think that would be a problem though, because the new pipelines will surely be ready and feature-rich in two years, so anyone starting their production at that time will have an easy choice.

I feel that builtin deprecation should start only when the new pipelines are truly production ready, not only for big studios with vast resources and lots of programmers but for indies as well, and supported with plenty of features in the asset store. They should let them grow to match the builtin support.

Anyway, even if builtin makes it to 2020 LTS, Unity devs can easily decide not to support builtin for next gen consoles. That's why some clarity about the future of builtin would be really welcome.