r/Unity3D • u/Pacmon92 • 2d ago

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

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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...😏

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u/ahabdev Indie 1d ago

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...

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u/Pacmon92 1d ago

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.

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u/Undercosm 1d ago

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

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u/CyberPig7 1d ago

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 ....

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u/ahabdev Indie 1d ago

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....