Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) Batcher

Note: This is a preview feature and is subject to change. Any Scenes that use this feature may need updating in a future release. Do not rely on this feature for full-scale production until it is officially released.

The SRP Batcher is a renderingThe process of drawing graphics to the screen (or to a render texture). By default, the main camera in Unity renders its view to the screen. More info
See in Glossary loop that speeds up your CPU rendering in ScenesA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary with many Materials that use the same ShaderA small script that contains the mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating the Color of each pixel rendered, based on the lighting input and the Material configuration. More info
See in Glossary Variant.

Enable SRP Batcher

To use the SRP Batcher, your Project must use a Scriptable Render Pipeline project. This can either be:

• Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP)
• High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
• A custom SRP.

To activate the SRP Batcher in either LWRP or HDRP:

1. In the Hierarchy window, select the LWRP Asset or HDRP Asset.
2. In the InspectorA Unity window that displays information about the currently selected GameObject, Asset or Project Settings, alowing you to inspect and edit the values. More info
   See in Glossary for the Asset, go to the Advanced section, and enable the SRP Batcher checkbox.

To enable or disable the SRP Batcher at run time, toggle this global variable in your C# code:

GraphicsSettings.useScriptableRenderPipelineBatching = true;`

Supported platforms

The SRP Batcher works on almost all platforms. This table shows supported platforms and the minimal Unity version required.

Note: For XRAn umbrella term encompassing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) applications. Devices supporting these forms of interactive applications can be referred to as XR devices. More info
See in Glossary, you can only use the SRP Batcher with the SinglePassInstanced mode.

How the SRP Batcher works

In Unity, you can modify the properties of any Material at any time during a frame. However, this has some drawbacks. For example, there is a lot of work to do when a DrawCall is using a new Material. So the more Materials you have in a Scene, the more CPU Unity has to use to set up GPU data. The traditional way to deal with this is to reduce the number of DrawCalls to optimize the CPU rendering cost, because Unity has to set up a lot of things before issuing the DrawCall. And the real CPU cost comes from that setup, not from the GPU DrawCall itself, which is just some bytes that Unity needs to push to the GPU command buffer.

The SRP Batcher reduces the GPU setup between DrawCalls by batching a sequence of Bind and Draw GPU commands.

To get the maximum performance for your rendering, these batches must be as large as possible. To achieve this, you can use as many different Materials with the same Shader as you want, but you must use as few Shader Variants as possible.

During the inner render loop, when Unity detects a new Material, the CPU collects all properties and sets up different constant buffers in GPU memory. The number of GPU buffers depends on how the Shader declares its CBUFFERs.

To speed up the general case where a Scene uses a lot of different Materials, but very few Shader variants, the SRP natively integrates paradigms such as GPU data persistency.

The SRP Batcher is a low-level render loop that makes Material data persist in GPU memory. If the Material content does not change, the SRP Batcher does not need to set up and upload the buffer to the GPU. Instead, the SRP Batcher uses a dedicated code path to quickly update the Unity Engine properties in a large GPU buffer, like this:

Here, the CPU only handles the Unity Engine properties, labelled Per Object large buffer in the above diagram. All Materials have persistent CBUFFERs located in GPU memory, which are ready to use. This speeds up rendering because: All Material content now persists in GPU memory. Dedicated code manages a large per-object GPU CBUFFER for all per-object properties.

SRP Batcher compatibility

For the SRP Batcher code path to render an object:

• The object must be in a meshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info
  See in Glossary, not a particle or a skinned mesh.
• The Shader must be compatible with the SRP Batcher. All Lit and Unlit Shaders in HDRP and LWRP fit this requirement (except for the Particles versions of these Shaders).

For a Shader to be compatible with the SRP Batcher:

• You must declare all built-in engine properties in a single CBUFFER named “UnityPerDraw”. For example, unity_ObjectToWorld, or unity_SHAr.
• You must declare all Material properties in a single CBUFFER named UnityPerMaterial.

You can see the compatibility status of a Shader in the Inspector panel.

In any given Scene, some objects compatible with the SRP Batcher, and some are not. Even when using non-compatible objects, Unity renders the Scene properly. This is because compatible objects use the SRP Batcher code path, and others use the standard SRP code path.

Profiling with the SRP Batcher

To measure the speed increase in your Scene when using the SRP Batcher, add the SRPBatcherProfiler.cs C# script from the SRP Batcher template to your Scene. When this script is running: Toggle the overlay display using the F8 key. You can also turn SRP Batcher on and off during play using the F9 key.

The overlay looks like this:

The time measurements are in milliseconds (ms), and show how much time the CPU spent in Unity SRP rendering loops.

Note: Time here equals cumulated time of all RenderLoop.Draw and Shadows.Draw markers that are called during a frame, regardless of the thread owner. For example, if you see 1.31ms SRP Batcher code path, maybe the draw calls have spent 0.31ms on the main thread, and 1ms is spread over all graphic jobs.

Overlay information

This table describes each setting in the SRP Batcher overlay that is visible in Play mode:

SRP Batcher data in the Unity Frame Debugger

You can check the status on SRP Batcher “batches” in the Frame Debugger window.

To check the status of SRP Batcher batches:

1. In the Editor, go to Window > Analysis > Frame Debugger > Render Camera > Render Opaques, and expand the RenderLoopNewBatcher.Draw list.
2. Click on the SRP Batch you want to inspect.

The SRP Batch details show you how many draw calls were used, which keywords were attached to the Shader, and the reason why that specific draw call wasn’t batched with the previous one. In the example below, the stated reason is: Node use different shader keywords. This means that the Shader keywords for that batch are different than the keywords in the previous batch. Because the SRP Batcher used a different Shader Variant, the batch was broken. If an SRP batch has a low number of draw calls, you’re most likely using too many Shader Variants.

If you’re writing your own SRP instead of using LWRP or HDRP, try to write a generic “uber” Shader with a minimal amount of keywords (but you can use as many Material parameters and Material Properties inside each Material as you want).

• 2019–06–09 Page published with editorial review

• Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) Batcher added in 2019.1 NewIn20191