About Universal Render Pipeline

The Universal Render Pipeline is one of Unity's Scriptable Render Pipelines. It is more extensible than the Built-in render pipeline in unity as well as running faster than other render pipelines as well. The Universal Render Pipeline can be a bit finnicky, especially with mobile devices, but it should result in a quality and performance increase.

Setting up URP

If you use a URP shader on a material in a project that's meant for the Built in Render Pipeline, it may just become purple. This is... not optimal. This is because we need to setup our project to work with URP.

Unity Docs provides excellent instructions for upgrading an existing project to the Universal Render Pipeline. Click the top left corner to select the relevant version of URP.

URP Features

URP has some extra features that you can play around with to see how it impacts the quality and performance of the app.

URP Asset

The URP asset contains the core settings of URP. This includes

• Rendering
• Quality
• Lighting
• Shadows
• Post Processing

URP Renderer

The URP renderer contains much less customizability than the URP Asset. It contains some rendering settings as well as some additional components that you can add (including the AR Background Renderer Feature, this is needed for camera passthrough with AR Foundation).

URP Volume

Volumes are primarily for postprocessing. If you have a GameObject with a Volume, and you add a custom Volume profile to it, then it will apply post processing according to how you tell URP to do so. It includes post processing features like tone mapping, bloom, motion blur, and more.