Alright so for Pneumagination at some point soon I’m probably going to be attempting to branch the build into Built In Render Pipeline so I can try out TrueTrace and see if thats the best option going forward for rendering.

TrueTrace is actual path tracing, but also doesn’t require RTX cards so it can be available to a wider audience. Unity’s pathtracer sucks so bad and its RTGI/SSGI feel pretty lackluster- especially with the fact that reflections don’t account for any RTGI bounces so interiors still look bad. TrueTrace seems to be able to pull off multiple bounces and still run fine, Unity dies when you try doing RTGI at 2 bounces.

Also while HDRP does let me use stuff like DLSS, it completely cuts out any complex shader making, and my current goal is having a Kuwahara filter for all objects, and then characters rendered cel-shaded ish with a drop shadow n such. HDRP would be hell to attempt this and probably would run worse too. Its not designed for path traced optimizations combined with stylization.