In the 4.26 Release Highlights video (here: 4.26 Release Highlights | Inside Unreal - YouTube) there was a section on mobile improvements and they mentioned that you could enable the desktop deferred renderer, they showed a video of their infiltrator demo running on an ipad pro.
They didn’t give any clues on how to actually enable these modes but from what I was able to deduce here is how you enable the various modes:
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Mobile Deferred Renderer
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r.Mobile.ShadingPath=1 in ConsoleVariables.ini
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“Metal Mobile Renderer” checkbox checked in iOS project settings
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Mobile Forward Renderer (default)
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Default project and ini settings
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r.Mobile.ShadingPath=0
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“Metal Mobile Renderer” checkbox checked
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Desktop Deferred Renderer
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r.Mobile.ShadingPath=1 in ConsoleVariables.ini
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“Metal Desktop Renderer” checked in iOS project settings
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“Metal Mobile Renderer” unchecked in iOS project settings
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Desktop Forward Renderer
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r.Mobile.ShadingPath=0
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“Metal Desktop Renderer” checked in iOS project settings
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“Metal Mobile Renderer” unchecked in iOS project settings
However I haven’t been able to get any of the modes except for the default Mobile Forward Renderer to actually render something without graphical glitches or crashing the engine.
See attached screenshots for images of the third person template on an iphone xs with the desktop forward and deferred renderers. The mobile deferred renderer doesn’t even work - the editor crashes every time when trying to compile shaders.
**Has anybody successfully got either the desktop deferred or forward renderers working on iOS? If so how did you do it? **
I really wish epic would just spend the 15 minutes writing documentation about this stuff, and if they aren’t willing to write docs on it they shouldn’t put it in release notes/highlights.