During development, it is often useful to see what your game will look like when rendered on a target platform with lower-spec graphics hardware than your development machine. This is very handy when writing custom shaders and rendering effects and also when you need check your game looks acceptable on an old machine.
You can set the graphics emulation level in the editor from the menu. Note that the available emulation options change according to the platform you are currently targeting - see the Publishing builds page for further details.
Graphics emulation limits the graphics capabilities that are supported, but it does not emulate the performance of graphics hardware. Your game is still rendered by your graphics card at full speed but more and more features will be disabled as you reduce emulation quality.
While emulation is a quick way to check out graphics capabilities, you should still test your game on actual hardware. This will reveal real performance and any peculiarities of the specific graphics card, operating system or driver version.
Graphics emulation levels are the following:
| No Emulation | No emulation is performed. |
| Shader Model 3 | Emulates graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 level capabilities. Long vertex & fragment shader programs, realtime shadows, HDR. |
| Shader Model 2 | Shader Model 2.0 capabilities. Vertex & fragment programs, realtime shadows. No HDR, maximum 4 texture combiner stages. |
| No Emulation | No emulation is performed. |
| OpenGL ES 2.0 | OpenGL ES 2.0: Vertex & fragment programs, four texture combiner stages. Not supported: HDR, 3D textures. |
When your graphics card does not support all the capabilities of some emulation level, that level will be disabled. For example, the Intel GMA950 (Intel 915/945/3000) card does not support Shader Model 3.0, so there's no way to emulate that level.
Page last updated: 2013-10-17