Enable GPU instancing for a prebuilt material

To enable GPU instancing for a prebuilt materials, follow these steps:

1. Select the material in the Project window.
2. In the Advanced Options section of the Inspector window, enable Enable GPU Instancing.

Note: If you use the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), the recommended best practice is to use the SRP Batcher instead, which is enabled by default. GPU instancing works only if you disable the SRP Batcher.

If multiple GameObjects use the same mesh and material, Unity now uses GPU instancing to render them in single draw calls. To check this, open the Frame Debugger and look for render passes called Draw Mesh (Instanced).

If there’s no Enable GPU Instancing property, the prebuilt shader doesn’t support GPU instancing.

Change the properties of instances

To change the properties of instances at runtime, for example to give each instance a different color or position, create a script to do the following:

1. Create a MaterialPropertyBlock with the property value for the instance.
2. Attach the script to the Mesh RendererA mesh component that takes the geometry from the Mesh Filter and renders it at the position defined by the object’s Transform component. More info
   See in Glossary component of the GameObject.

For more information, refer to MaterialPropertyBlock.

Create custom instances

To render multiple instances of a mesh in a script using GPU instancing, use one of the following APIs:

• Graphics.RenderMeshInstanced
• Graphics.RenderMeshIndirect
• Graphics.RenderMeshPrimitives

Additional resources

• Creating custom shaders that support GPU instancing in the Built-In Render Pipeline
• Indirect & Procedural Rendering in Shader Graph