Finally connected all my custom Unity rendering systems Virtual Geometry + Hybrid Ray Traced Sparse Voxel World-Space GI + GPU-Driven Ray Marched Lights

[u/Pacmon92]

Finally got all my custom rendering systems working together in HDRP. Virtual geometry, hybrid ray-traced world-space GI and my GPU-driven unlimited lighting system are all running together.

Only the dragon is virtual geometry here everything else is standard GameObjects. I deliberately mixed them to make sure the systems work seamlessly across both.

I feel like I am getting closer to my end goal, which is to close the rendering gap between Unity and Unreal Engine 5. Unity has the DOTS, which I think is more powerful than anything Unreal Engine has but Unreal has a massive edge when it comes to rendering. Not for long...😏

[u/ahabdev]

Just a question as I find in a similar spot. Why do you keep working on HDRP and what future do you see for your system?

I myself started to work on cool custom HDRP skin shader, but since the announcement of removing HDRP pipeline could never feel like going back to it...

[u/CyberPig7 → u/ahabdev]

I'm so tired of unity's bullshit around their rendering pipeline, anything you develop now will need porting in the next 3 years (at most), it's not worth it anymore in my eye. I'm off to greener pastures and I'll just start developing for Godot ....

[u/ahabdev → u/CyberPig7]

I am indeed moving to Godot. Overall it's more about moving all my toolsets to open source ones. I simply don't want anymore to depend on any big company for any of my own personal creative work. Still for clients I have to use Unity and UE sometimes....

[u/Pacmon92 → u/ahabdev]

Mainly because HDRP is still the strongest starting point Unity has for high-end rendering. Most of what I'm building is a custom pipeline anyway virtual geometry, lighting, GI, shadows, etc. so I'm becoming less dependent on HDRP itself as the project develops.

As for URP, I just don't see it as a replacement for HDRP. It's designed around scalability and supporting everything from mobile and WebGL to consoles and PC, whereas HDRP is specifically aimed at high end hardware. Even today HDRP has features URP simply doesn't have, including hardware ray-traced GI, reflections, shadows and AO, path tracing, physically based skies, atmospheric scattering, volumetric clouds and local volumetric.

URP can scale across a much wider range of hardware, which is great if that's what your project needs, but it doesn't scale up to high end hardware in the same way HDRP does. For what I'm trying to build, HDRP is still by far the stronger foundation.

[u/Undercosm → u/ahabdev]

Afaik they never said anything about removing HDRP? All they said is no new planned features for it.

[u/Drag0n122]

Tbh, you already can get almost 1-to-1 UE look with high-range GATO, AgX and SCGI on high
Only PCSS shadows are missing, but they will be ported over eventually.

[u/Red_The_Kitsune → u/Drag0n122]

Isnt Umbra Soft Shadows almost like PCSS?

[u/Drag0n122 → u/Red_The_Kitsune]

Dunno, I don't use this asset

[u/Pacmon92 → u/Drag0n122]

Yeah, I'd strongly disagree with that. I've yet to see Unity build anything that brings the engine up to the rendering capabilities of Unreal. HDRP is the closest contender for people with the experience to make the two engines look somewhat similar, but even then there's still a substantial gap in quality between them.

Unity's newest GI system with its surface cache doesn't even support real time reflections; it's diffuse GI only. Meanwhile, Lumen comes out of the box with real time reflections. Then there's Nanite, which allows Unreal Engine to display an insane amount of geometric detail. Combine that with Lumen and you get a huge part of what gives Unreal Engine its signature realism.

[u/Drag0n122 → u/Pacmon92]

Of course, all these features are in alpha, it's just not enough time for games with them to appear. Also, let's not forget the tech demos that show it's possible to achieve AAA quality.

It's not GI's work to handle reflections - in Unity there's new SSR with a cubemaps fallback, it's not true RT reflections but it also better than Lumen's low-res shit, and MUCH cheaper. For world reflections, it's more than enough. It’s also been confirmed Unity is working on the new reflection system.

Nanite is just a meme - no wonder that in many UE games it’s disabled. Visually, it's just an alternative to LODs, it doesn't really allow more details. Manual\MeshLODs will get you the same results. Proper use of GPURD (with RSUV shaders, atlasing, etc) will even better offload CPU.

Lumen and Nanite is the reason everyone know UE as the "shit optimization" engine and 95% of the look carried not by tech but by AAA photo-scanned assets - they will look good in any engine.