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Create free accountWhitepaperKazakh-British Technical University
It evaluates Screen Space Global Illumination, built-in Realtime Lightmaps, and the recently proposed Radiance Cascades within Unity's Universal Render Pipeline.
This study empirically evaluates real-time global illumination (GI) methods within the Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP), comparing Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), built-in Realtime Lightmaps (RTLM), and Radiance Cascades (RC). The primary goal is to provide developer-oriented recommendations by analyzing performance, visual stability, and implementation complexity across diverse game scenarios. The evaluation was conducted on a Windows 11 laptop with an Intel Core i7-13620H CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, using Unity 6000.2.12f1.
Three distinct scenarios were tested: a realistic first-person shooter (FPS) urban exterior, an isometric scene, and a stylized low-poly interior. Camera paths were predefined, and dynamic lighting events were synchronized to ensure consistent conditions. Performance metrics, including FPS and frame time, were collected, alongside qualitative visual analysis of artifacts such as temporal instability, ghosting, and inconsistencies in indirect lighting. The experimental scenes were constructed using publicly available Unity Asset Store packages, and all experimental artifacts are publicly available in a project repository.
Key findings indicate that RC and RTLM generally offer significantly higher frame rates than SSGI across all scenarios. In the isometric scene, RC consistently outperformed RTLM by 5-10 FPS, with both achieving around 220 FPS, while SSGI hovered around 105 FPS. In the realistic environment, RC showed the highest overall performance, though it converged with RTLM during high-frequency local lighting changes. SSGI's moderate performance in this scenario was attributed to its camera-dependent nature, leading to underlit areas. For the stylized interior, the relative performance remained consistent (RC ≈ RTLM > SSGI), with an approximate 20% increase in average frame rate due to reduced complexity.
Qualitative analysis revealed distinct visual characteristics. RC produced convincing indirect illumination from dynamic emissive sources but exhibited a pronounced bloom-like effect and over-amplification of indirect radiance in high-intensity daylight, making it less suitable for physically plausible daylight. RTLM provided the most visually natural and stable indirect lighting for static geometry but failed to incorporate dynamic emissive contributions. SSGI suffered from overall scene darkening and light traces behind moving objects due to reliance on previous frames, though it provided the most visually pleasing results in confined interior spaces where geometry remained on-screen. The study recommends RC for scenes with numerous dynamic light sources observed from a distance, SSGI for contained interiors where primary reflecting surfaces are visible, and RTLM as a supplement for stable lighting of static geometry from dynamic sources.
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Thomas Brush · 2026
