HDRP

HDRP, or High Definition Render Pipeline, is Unity’s rendering pipeline designed to deliver high-fidelity, photoreal visuals. It is part of Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipeline framework, enabling developers to customize rendering behavior through configurable assets and shaders. HDRP is targeted at high-end PCs and game consoles, where hardware can support advanced lighting and post-processing features.

The pipeline provides advanced lighting and shading capabilities based on physically based rendering. It supports high-quality materials through the Lit shader and related HDRP shaders, as well as volumetric lighting and fog, real-time and baked global illumination workflows, and detailed shadows. HDRP also emphasizes physical accuracy and physically based light transport to improve realism in complex scenes.

HDRP includes a range of rendering features for reflections, lighting, and post-processing. Reflections are handled with options like screen-space reflections and reflection probes, with potential ray tracing on supported hardware. Volumetric effects, motion, and depth-based post-processing are integrated through the Volume system, allowing designers to compose visual effects with control via volumes and profiles.

In practice, HDRP is enabled by installing the HDRP package and converting the project to use an HDRP asset, which stores the pipeline settings. HDRP relies on dedicated shaders and tools, including Shader Graph support for HDRP, to author materials and effects. While capable of delivering AAA-quality visuals, HDRP requires more powerful hardware and is generally not optimized for mobile or lower-end devices.

HDRP is commonly used for projects where visual fidelity is a priority, such as AAA games, architectural visualization, and cinematic experiences, and is often chosen when teams need precise lighting, high-end reflections, and sophisticated post-processing.