Version: Unity 6.5 Alpha (6000.5)
Language : English
Types of Light component
Place Light components

Per-pixel and per-vertex lights

Important: The Built-In Render Pipeline is deprecated and will be made obsolete in a future release.
It remains supported, including bug fixes and maintenance, through the full Unity 6.7 LTS lifecycle.
For more information on migration, refer to Migrating from the Built-In Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline and Render pipeline feature comparison.

If you use the default Forward rendering path, each realtime Light component can be one of the following types:

  • A per-pixel light, which lights each pixelThe smallest unit in a computer image. Pixel size depends on your screen resolution. Pixel lighting is calculated at every screen pixel. More info
    See in Glossary
    of an object accurately.
  • A per-vertex light, which lights each vertex of an object accurately. Unity interpolates lighting for the pixels between vertices.

Per-pixel lights give more accurate results but reduce performance.

The Built-In Render PipelineA series of operations that take the contents of a Scene, and displays them on a screen. Unity lets you choose from pre-built render pipelines, or write your own. More info
See in Glossary
also sets some lights as Spherical Harmonic (SH) per-vertex lights, which are the least accurate but render the fastest.

For more information, refer to the following:

Additional resources

Types of Light component
Place Light components