Universal Render Pipeline

[Kurt_Frary]

GameDev.TV in this video Nathan selects Universal Render Pipeline instead of 2D or 3D, why and whats the difference?

Kurt

[Anthony_Juarez]

URP is constantly in development and has come a long way. In the future, it will be Unity’s default pipeline and we will no longer have those 2D or 3D options. I think that’s probably the best reason to use it.

As far as differences, URP has some post-processing effects that look really nice, and a new ShaderGraph tool for designing shaders which give you cool visual effects. URP has a harder time working with shadows and multiple lights, but that got a lot better in the recent 2020 and 2021 upgrades, and is getting better all the time.

The biggest drawback of URP is that it doesn’t play nice with older shaders, which can be a problem when importing assets. It’s built in material upgrade tool can be used to upgrade many materials to use URP shaders, but many others will have to be replaced manually or will look like giant pink blobs when imported. So if you get assets from the asset store or something, you’ll want to make sure they are URP-compatible.

The biggest appeal of URP is the ShaderGraph tool that allows users to design really nice shader effects visually, by creating nodes and trees and moving stuff around rather than coding, especially since shader coding is done in another language.

Also, and maybe this is more important and a more relavent answer to your question, URP was built for increased performance on the graphics with mobile devices especially in mind. It allows you to use better visual effects, without requiring as much hardware resources because it uses specially designed shaders made to be efficient and share resources.

I really don’t think it matters either way for the kinds of games we’re making, but I haven’t seen all the games yet.

[Kurt_Frary]

@Anthony_Juarez

Thanks this is really useful to understand, thanks for taking the time to explain it.

I get it now!

Kurt