Render Pipeline
How a frame is drawn
Also known as: Rendering pipeline · Graphics pipeline
Definition
A render pipeline is the sequence of steps an engine takes to turn scene data (meshes, materials, lights) into a final frame on screen. Modern engines ship with different pipelines tuned for different trade-offs: Unity has URP, HDRP, and Built-in; Unreal has Forward and Deferred. The pipeline choice constrains which features (post-processing, lighting models, shading complexity) are available and how cheaply they render — switching pipelines mid-project is usually painful, so it is decided at project start.
In production
Picking a pipeline is one of the first technical decisions on a project. Stylized mobile game? URP. Photoreal PC/console? HDRP or Unreal deferred. The pipeline dictates shader graph compatibility, lighting model, and which assets from the Asset Store will actually work.
