Unity have just made a major announcement on the futures of Unity graphics pipelines, specifically the Built-In pipeline and the HDRP. In a nutshell the Built-In pipeline is about to be marked as deprecated and the HDRP is effectively as good as dead.
Details from the Unity community forums:
We want to share where our focus is when it comes to Unity’s render pipelines. This is a topic we know is on a lot of your minds, and one we discussed extensively with many of you, including at Unite Barcelona. We’ve heard your feedback about the complexity that comes from fragmented options, and we’re making some key changes in 2026 to simplify things and focus our efforts where they can make the biggest impact for you.
- Advancing the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) to enable developers to rapidly innovate, prototype, and bring to market any game of any genre with high performance across every platform. We are concentrating our efforts to bring forward even faster performance, build time, enhanced stability and extensibility, as well as new beautiful 3D lighting runtime capabilities for dynamic and procedural worlds.
- Maintaining HDRP, focusing only on expanding platform reach with Nintendo Switch™ 2 support and stability. We want to ensure that developers who leverage HDRP have a clear path to reach new players.
- Starting the official Built-in Render Pipeline deprecation process in 6.5, to simplify our product, enable our ecosystem to focus on our latest technologies moving forward, and accelerate our focus on URP. Built-in Render Pipeline will still be available at least up through Unity 6.7 LTS (due end of year) to support studios with live games, but we strictly do not recommend it for any new title. The final removal version is not yet decided and will depend on your feedback.
Deprecating the Built-in Render Pipeline
To reduce our graphics engine fragmentation, simplify onboarding, allowing our ecosystem to focus entirely on our default technologies, and lowering maintenance costs for everyone, we are starting the process of officially deprecating the Built-in Render Pipeline.
First we are marking the Built-in Render Pipeline as deprecated in Unity 6.5. This means that we strongly encourage using URP when starting any new project, and converting all education and asset store content to be compatible by default with URP.
For existing live games using Built-in Render Pipeline, we encourage you to start looking into porting your project to Scriptable Render Pipelines.
While a removal date has not yet been decided, we can guarantee that the Built-in Render Pipeline will continue to be available in the Unity 6.7 LTS version. This means that you will be covered with official Built-in Render Pipeline support at least until the end of 2028 (and 2029 with Unity Enterprise or Unity Industry licenses).
It is our firm intention to remove availability of the Built-in Render Pipeline in the future, but before we decide for a final end date, we want to hear from you.
Key Links
You can learn more about the deprecation of the Built-In pipeline and the virtual death of the HDRP as development effectively ceases in the video below.