Universal Render Pipeline (URP)

URP allows you to deploy your projects on over 17 platforms, from VR and mobile devices to high-end consoles and desktop machines.

Out of the box, URP provides three rendering paths to better support the variety of games you can develop with Unity. Forward rendering provides optimized material and lighting workflows that scale well for all supported platforms. Deferred rendering offers the ability to render a large number of lights without incurring the significant performance hits typically associated with forward rendering techniques. This is a great option for more complex visuals tailored for higher-end mobile devices, consoles, and desktop machines. Finally, 2D rendering delivers great real-time light and shadows for your 2D games.

Make URP your own by modifying it to suit your project’s artistic vision and performance requirements. For instance, you can choose a leaner approach by removing unneeded passes, or inject custom passes and renderers to enhance the pipeline’s visual capabilities. Unity also provides URP source code access for further customization.

URP supports a wide range of direct and indirect lighting solutions. Take advantage of rendering features including real-time shadows for Spot and Point Lights, Light Cookies, and Reflection Probe blending.

The CPU and GPU lightmapper allows you to bake the lighting in-Editor, so the complex rendering of lighting can be greatly optimized for runtime, particularly on hardware with lower performance capabilities. Furthermore, URP supports Realtime Global Illumination via Enlighten, allowing you to update the lighting and material properties at runtime.

With URP’s user-friendly yet professional post-processing effects, you can alter final image colors and simulate camera lens effects such as Depth of Field, Vignette, Motion Blur, Bloom, and Film Grain. Lens Flares allow you to create procedural flares and scattering with automatic occlusion.

To help with your transition from the Built-in Render Pipeline, URP offers numerous rendering capabilities, from Camera Stacking to Light Cookies and Point Light Shadows as well as renderer features such as Decals and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO).

In addition, URP supports the latest node-based tools offered by Unity. Shader Graph allows you to visually author shaders in real-time. With VFX Graph, you can leverage the power of your GPU to create extraordinary VFX.

Thanks to its large platform reach, URP already powers numerous successful games, such as the relaxing puzzle platformer LEGO Builder’s Journey and the action-adventure game Lost in Random.

To help you start creating inspiring experiences in URP, discover the URP 3D Sample to learn how to create, customize, and scale beautiful graphics with flexibility and performance.