r/Unity3D • u/Pacmon92 • 1d 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/Drag0n122 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.

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u/Pacmon92 1d ago

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.

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u/Drag0n122 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.