In May 2019 the team set out on a mammoth task to explore and switch Rust over to Unity's HDRP pipeline. HDRP boasted many visual fidelity improvements and new tech, best of all it was said HDRP was more optimized resulting in better performance. Switching and updating all our assets over to HDRP was months of work but we figured it would be worth it in the end. Long story short after months of work, testing and profiling we never saw the performance gains we expected from HDRP, in fact, it was worse. Faced with this dilemma we took the difficult and long overdue decision to halt all progress on HDRP and begin to backport all the updated assets back to the current pipeline.
After many more months we're now at a stage we feel the backport is approaching the final stages and ready for public testing and feedback. Wednesday, April 7th we'll be opening HDRP backport publically which will be available to play from the "Rust - Staging" client via Steam by opting into the "Aux01" beta branch.
The backport has updated nearly all of the world objects, rocks, foliage, trees and even many monuments have received some love.
Shadowfrax got exclusive access - Everything shown is subject to change!
Due to the nature of continued changes on the backport wipes will be frequent, we do not recommend regular play, at least until later into the month.
Mapmakers be aware a number of assets have been removed/updated which may have an impact on your existing designs.
If testing and feedback prove positive we'll be aiming to release the backport on Thursday, May 6th. We don't expect performance to be better than release but we also don't expect it to be worse.