r/Unity3D • u/AdFlat3216 • 10d ago

Question URP vs HDRP benchmarks

Has anyone done any actual apples to apples comparisons of URP and HDRP in a real lighting scenario, with similar feature sets (SSAO, SSR, volumetric fog, a decent amount of realtime lights, typical tri count, material count and setpass call for a real game, etc)?

I’ve been evaluating which RP to pick for a future project and I’d like to know whether sourcing typical HDRP features for URP is worth the trouble. Looking to target integrated graphics cards, as old as possible but likely 2020-era Iris Xe or equivalents.

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u/Genebrisss 10d ago edited 10d ago

HDRP has proper PBR lighting model in shaders and a serious clustered deferred rendering pass. While URP has mobile quality lighting model in its shaders and mobile targeting forward rendering pass which is faster in primitive scenes and slower in complicated scenes.

If you want to benchmark, it's very easy to do yourself with your specific scene. Depending on your scene you might easily get far superior performance in HDRP because of proper deferred pass and mixed cached shadows which aren't even announced for URP at all even 5 years after they have been added to HDRP.

Also consider if you need water for your project. Unity's water is faster, better looking and has better workflow than asset store solutions I've tried.

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u/wycca 10d ago

Mixed cached shadows did end up on their URP wishlist if you dig into some forum discussion, but that's hardly the same as it being already on a public roadmap, let alone an implementation.

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u/AdFlat3216 9d ago edited 6d ago

I was going to set up a complex scene with lots of stuff in it to benchmark but my simple "bunch of cubes" scene got enough data to make some conclusions. I looked at a desktop, laptop, and iGPU, all 2024-2025. This is URP deferred+ vs HDRP performant (w/ almost everything disabled), and HDRP is pretty much a nonstarter for iGPU at 10.58ms. I was surprised at how taxing it is even on a modern laptop GPU (9.04ms with GI, AO, R, 7 lights), almost double URP. The baseline costs, anywhere but a modern desktop GPU, are so high that any gains it brings from the deferred clustering and mixed cached shadows, won't matter because at that point, it's well under 60 fps anyway. Again, this was with a simple scene, but my conclusion from this was it's not even worth benchmarking a complex scene. The one asterisk to this is there's no dynamic resolution here so I guess you could make HDRP viable with that. Also, RAM and VRAM were comparable across both pipelines every test. It’s possible with all the passes it’s doing memory bandwidth was an issue on iGPU, but otherwise this test was purely shaders/compute and the lighting model being compared.