Unity loads compiled shaders from your built application in the following way:
This approach ensures that Unity and the graphics driver avoid processing and storing all the shader variants on the GPU before Unity needs them. But there might be a visible stall when the graphics driver creates a GPU-specific shader variant for the first time.
Unity caches each GPU-specific shader variant, to avoid another stall when Unity needs the shader variant again.
Unity removes the shader variant completely from CPU and GPU memory when there are no longer any objects that reference the shader variant.
Unity only loads compiled shaders that are compatible with the platform’s graphics API, hardware and graphics tier.
If Unity can’t find the shader variant it needs because you or Unity stripped the shader variant from your built application, Unity tries to select a similar shader variant. If Unity can’t find a similar shader variant, it uses the magenta error shader.
You can enable strict shader variant matching to stop Unity trying to select a similar shader variant.
If a shader variant contains multiple subshaders, Unity tries to select and use a single subshader that’s compatible with all of the following:
Unity searches for the first compatible subshader among the following elements in the following order:
If Unity can’t find a compatible subshader, it uses the magenta error shader.
You can set which subshaders are compatible with which hardware using ShaderLabUnity’s language for defining the structure of Shader objects. More info
See in Glossary tags. See ShaderLab: assigning tags to a SubShader.
To check when a shader loads from serialized data, search for the following profiler markersPlaced in code to describe a CPU or GPU event that is then displayed in the Unity Profiler window. Added to Unity code by default, or you can use ProfilerMarker API to add your own custom markers. More info
See in Glossary in the ProfilerA window that helps you to optimize your game. It shows how much time is spent in the various areas of your game. For example, it can report the percentage of time spent rendering, animating, or in your game logic. More info
See in Glossary:
Shader.ParseThreaded
Shader.ParseMainThread
To check when a shader unloads shader variants, search for the Shader.MainThreadCleanup
profiler marker.
Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
Thanks for rating this page!
What kind of problem would you like to report?
Thanks for letting us know! This page has been marked for review based on your feedback.
If you have time, you can provide more information to help us fix the problem faster.
Provide more information
You've told us this page needs code samples. If you'd like to help us further, you could provide a code sample, or tell us about what kind of code sample you'd like to see:
You've told us there are code samples on this page which don't work. If you know how to fix it, or have something better we could use instead, please let us know:
You've told us there is information missing from this page. Please tell us more about what's missing:
You've told us there is incorrect information on this page. If you know what we should change to make it correct, please tell us:
You've told us this page has unclear or confusing information. Please tell us more about what you found unclear or confusing, or let us know how we could make it clearer:
You've told us there is a spelling or grammar error on this page. Please tell us what's wrong:
You've told us this page has a problem. Please tell us more about what's wrong:
Thank you for helping to make the Unity documentation better!
Your feedback has been submitted as a ticket for our documentation team to review.
We are not able to reply to every ticket submitted.