Graphics Emulation
You can choose to emulate less capable graphics hardware when working in the Unity editor. This is very handy when writing custom shaders and rendering effects, and is a quick way to test how your game will look on that eight year old graphics card that someone might have.
To enable Graphics emulation, go to , and choose your desired emulation level.
Note: The available graphic emulation options change depending on the platform you are currently targeting. More information can be found on the Publishing builds page.
Enabling Graphics Emulation
Technical Details
Graphics emulation limits the graphics capabilities that are supported, but it does not emulate the performance of graphics hardware. Your game in the editor will still be rendered by your graphics card, more and more features will be disabled as you reduce emulation quality.
While emulation is a quick way to check out graphics capabilities, you should still test your game on actual hardware. This will reveal real performance and any peculiarities of the specific graphics card, operating system or driver version.
Emulation Levels
Graphics emulation levels are the following:
Desktop
| No Emulation | No emulation is performed. |
| SM3.0 | Emulates graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 level capabilities. Long vertex & fragment shader programs and support for built-in shadows. |
| SM2.0 (Radeon 9500) | Shader Model 2.0 capabilities, ATI Radeon style. Vertex & fragment programs, support for built-in shadows, ATI text fragment shader extension, 8 texture units. |
| SM2.0 (GeForce FX) | Shader Model 2.0 capabilities, NVIDIA GeForce style. Vertex & fragment programs, support for built-in shadows, 4 texture units. |
| SM1.4 (Radeon 8500) | Shader Model 1.4 capabilities. Vertex programs, ATI text fragment shader extension, 6 texture units. Not supported: fragment programs, built-in shadows. |
| SM1.1 (GeForce 3) | Shader Model 1.1 capabilities. Vertex programs, 4 texture units. Not supported: fragment programs, built-in shadows. |
| DX7 (Radeon 7500) | DirectX 7 level capabilities. Vertex programs (usually in software mode), 3 texture units. Not supported: fragment programs, built-in shadows. |
| DX7 (GeForce 2) | DirectX 7 level capabilities. Vertex programs (usually in software mode), 2 texture units, texture size limited to 2048, cubemap size limited to 512. Not supported: fragment programs, built-in shadows, volume textures, some complex texture combine modes. |
| DX6 | DirectX 6 level capabilities. 2 texture units, texture size limited to 1024. Not supported: vertex & fragment programs, built-in shadows, cubemaps, volume textures, rectangle textures, three argument texture combine modes, DOT3 texture combine modes, projected textures. |
| Dinosaur | Emulates graphics cards everyone already forgot about! One texture unit, texture size limited to 512, vertex light count limited to 4. Not supported: vertex & fragment programs, built-in shadows, cubemaps, RenderTextures, volume textures, rectangle textures, three argument texture combine modes, DOT3 texture combine modes, projected textures. |
iOS
| No Emulation | No emulation is performed. |
| iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad OpenGL ES2.0 | Emulates iPhone 3GS or newer iOS hardware running OpenGL ES 2.0. |
| iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad OpenGL ES1.1 | Emulates iPhone 3GS or newer iOS hardware running OpenGL ES 1.1. |
| Generic OpenGLES1.1 (4 texture stages) | Partially emulates iOS hardware running OpenGL ES 1.1. Useful for running Unity Editor on older cards/drivers which had support for only 4 texture combiners. |
| iPhone (MBXlite) | Emulates iPhone/iPod Touch hardware older than iPhone 3GS. Supports 2 texture combiners. |
Android
| No Emulation | No emulation is performed. |
| Generic OpenGL ES2.0 | Emulates hardware running OpenGL ES 2.0. |
| Generic OpenGLES1.1 (4 texture stages) | Partially emulates Android hardware running OpenGL ES 1.1. Useful for running Unity Editor on older cards/drivers which had support for only 4 texture combiners. |
When your graphics card does not support all the capabilities of some emulation level, that level will be disabled. For example, the Intel GMA950 (Intel 915/945/3000) card does not support Shader Model 3.0, so there's no way to emulate that level.
Page last updated: 2011-02-20