You can use logging and profiling tools to check how many shader variants Unity compiles, and identify ways you can remove (strip) variants to improve build times and reduce memory usage. You can do the following:
You can generate a list of shader variants that the Editor uses in the Scene view and the Game view. To do this:
After you build your project, open the Editor.log
log file and search for Compiling shader
to see which variants Unity compiles and strips. For example:
Compiling shader "Universal Render Pipeline/Lit" pass "ForwardLit" (fp)
320 / 786432 variants left after stripping, processed in 6.77 seconds
starting compilation...
finished in 29.72 seconds. Local cache hits 202 (0.24s CPU time), remote cache hits 0 (0.00s CPU time), compiled 118 variants (582.41s CPU time), skipped 0 variants
If you’re using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), you can also log how many variants Unity compiles and strips in total. Select a logging level other than Disabled under Shader Stripping > Shader Variant Log Level in the following:
This adds Total
logging to Editor.log
. For example:
STRIPPING: Universal Render Pipeline/Lit (ForwardLit pass) (Fragment) - Remaining shader variants = 640/5760 = 11.11111% - Total = 2657/10169 = 26.12843%
See log files for the location of Editor.log
.
Unity prints a Compiled shader
message in the Console Window when it compiles a shader for the GPU.
Use the Memory Profiler module or the Memory Profiler package to check how much memory shaders are using at runtime. If a shader uses a lot of memory, you can experiment with stripping its variants.
In Unity 2022.2 and above, you can force Unity to show a pink error shader during runtime, when a Material tries to use a missing shader variant.
You can also enable this in C# scripts using strictShaderVariantMatching
.
When you do this, Unity shows a warning in the console with the missing variant and its keywords. You can use this during stripping to check you don’t remove shader variants your project needs.
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