Rendering Paths

Unity supports different RenderingThe process of drawing graphics to the screen (or to a render texture). By default, the main camera in Unity renders its view to the screen. More info
See in Glossary Paths. You should choose which one you use depending on your game content and target platform / hardware. Different rendering paths have different performance characteristics that mostly affect Lights and Shadows. See render pipeline for technical details.

The rendering path used by your project is chosen on the Graphics window. Additionally, you can override it for each CameraA component which creates an image of a particular viewpoint in your scene. The output is either drawn to the screen or captured as a texture. More info
See in Glossary.

If the graphics card can’t handle a selected rendering path, Unity automatically uses a lower fidelity one. For example, on a GPU that can’t handle Deferred ShadingA rendering path that places no limit on the number of lights that can affect a GameObject. All lights are evaluated per-pixel, which means that they all interact correctly with normal maps and so on. Additionally, all lights can have cookies and shadows. More info
See in Glossary, Forward RenderingA rendering path that renders each object in one or more passes, depending on lights that affect the object. Lights themselves are also treated differently by Forward Rendering, depending on their settings and intensity. More info
See in Glossary will be used.

Deferred Shading

Deferred Shading is the rendering path with the most lighting and shadow fidelity, and is best suited if you have many realtime lights. It requires a certain level of hardware support.

For more details see the Deferred Shading page.

Forward Rendering

Forward is the traditional rendering path. It supports all the typical Unity graphics features (normal maps, per-pixel lights, shadows etc.). However under default settings, only a small number of the brightest lights are rendered in per-pixel lighting mode. The rest of the lights are calculated at object vertices or per-object.

For more details see the Forward Rendering page.

Legacy Deferred

Legacy Deferred (light prepass) is similar to Deferred Shading, just using a different technique with different trade-offs. It does not support the Unity 5 physically based standard shaderA built-in shader for rendering real-world objects such as stone, wood, glass, plastic and metal. Supports a wide range of shader types and combinations. More info
See in Glossary.

For more details see the Deferred Lighting page.

Legacy Vertex Lit

Legacy Vertex Lit is the rendering path with the lowest lighting fidelity and no support for realtime shadows. It is a subset of Forward rendering path.

For more details see the Vertex Lit page.

NOTE: Deferred rendering is not supported when using Orthographic projection. If the camera’s projection mode is set to Orthographic, these values are overridden, and the camera will always use Forward rendering.

Rendering Paths Comparison