HLSL data types

Unity supports HLSL data types, but handles some differently to provide better support on mobile platforms.

Floating point suffixes

Unity doesn’t support HLSL floating point suffixes.

For example if you use 2.0h to create a half precision float, Unity treats it as a high precision float instead.

Floating point exception handling

Test your shadersA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary on the target platform to know how it handles floating point exceptions (for example, division by zero).

Desktop GPUs that support Direct3D 10 support the IEEE 754 floating point standard. This means that float numbers behave exactly as they do in regular programming languages on the CPU.

Mobile GPUs might not support that standard and handle floating point exceptions differently. For example, division by zero might result in NaN, zero or another value.

Fixed precision

This is only supported by the OpenGL ES 2.0 Graphics API. On other APIs it becomes the lowest supported precision (half or float).

This is the lowest precision fixed point value and is generally 11 bits. fixed values range from –2.0 to +2.0 and have a precision of 1/256.

Fixed precision is useful for regular colors (that are typically stored in regular textures) and performing simple operations on them.

Additional resources

• Use 16-bit precision in shaders
• Data Types (HLSL) in the Microsoft HLSL documentation.
• Writing shaders for different graphics APIs
• Optimizing Shader Runtime Performance