Rendering Paths

Unity supports different Rendering Paths. You should choose which one you use depending on your game content and target platform / hardware. Different rendering paths have different features and performance characteristics that mostly affect Lights and Shadows.

The rendering Path used by your project is chosen in Player Settings. Additionally, you can override it for each Camera.

If the graphics card can’t handle a selected rendering path, Unity will automatically use a lower fidelity one. So on a GPU that can’t handle Deferred Lighting, Forward Rendering will be used. If Forward Rendering is not supported, Vertex Lit will be used.

Deferred Lighting

Deferred Lighting is the rendering path with the most lighting and shadow fidelity. It is best used if you have many realtime lights. It requires a certain level of hardware support, is for Unity Pro only.

For more details see the Deferred Lighting page.

Forward Rendering

Forward is a shader-based rendering path. It supports per-pixel lighting (including normal maps & light Cookies) and realtime shadows from one directional light. In the default settings, a small number of the brightest lights are rendered in per-pixel lighting mode. The rest of the lights are calculated at object vertices.

For more details see the Forward Rendering page.

Vertex Lit

Vertex Lit is the rendering path with the lowest lighting fidelity and no support for realtime shadows. It is best used on old machines or limited mobile platforms.

For more details see the Vertex Lit page.

Rendering Paths Comparison