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 Edit->Graphics Emulation, 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.

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:

In web player or standalone mode:

No Emulation	No emulation is performed.
Shader Model 3	Emulates graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 level capabilities. Long vertex & fragment shader programs, realtime shadows, HDR.
Shader Model 2	Shader Model 2.0 capabilities. Vertex & fragment programs, realtime shadows. No HDR, maximum 4 texture combiner stages.
Shader Model 1	Shader Model 1.x capabilities. Vertex programs, 4 texture combiner stages. Not supported: fragment programs, shadows, HDR, depth textures, multiple render targets.
DirectX 7	DirectX 7 level capabilities. Vertex programs (usually in software mode), two texture combiner stages. Not supported: fragment programs, shadows, HDR, depth textures, 3D textures, min/max/sub blending.

In iOS or Android mode:

No Emulation	No emulation is performed.
OpenGL ES 1.x	OpenGL ES 1.1: Four texture combiner stages. Not supported: vertex or fragment programs, shadows and pretty much all other graphics features ;)
OpenGL ES 2.0	OpenGL ES 2.0: Vertex & fragment programs, four texture combiner stages. Not supported: HDR, 3D textures.

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: 2012-08-17