How to Blit in URP

Use SRP Blitter if what you need to do is available and implemented in that API, use the DrawMesh approach for any other cases, avoid cmd.Blit()

For historical reasons URP doesn't currently have a proper standard in terms of "how to Blit".
I agree that this is very confusing, and it is something we are trying to document better as we speak.
This is an important ongoing discussion at the moment, since reviewing the state of our blits is also an important preparation step for some core changes in URP, better NativeRenderPass and RenderGraph support. Following these best practices early on existing projects should also make your life easier when upgrading to the next URP releases.

I'll try to do a quick summary here, but you should expect documentation coming soon:

1) cmd.Blit() should not be used. The main reason is that it is a bit of a "black box", since it contains a lot of built-in logic, in terms of changing states, binding textues and setting render targets. All of these are happening under the hood, so not transparently from an SRP point of view, which can cause some issues. Other big issues with cmd.Blit(): it "breaks" NativeRenderPass and RenderGraph compatibility, so any pass using cmd.Blit will not be able to take advantage of these. It also doesn't work well in XR. Its usage might also be deprecated in future URP versions.

2) the same applies obviously to any utilities/wrappers relying on cmd.Blit() internally, so for example RenderingUtils.Blit should be avoided as well

3) The current How to perform a full screen blit in Single Pass Instanced rendering in XR is a good example to follow. Under the hood cmd.Blit() does pretty much the same, except in this case everything is handled at the SRP level, which is the way to go. I think the fact that the page is mentioning XR is a bit confusing, since this is a perfectly valid way of doing blit on all platforms. So I am looking at updating that page. It is also in need of some sample code changes* since in the current state it doesn't work anymore on 22.1, because of the recently introduced RTHandles support.

4) The SRP Blit API "to use" is Core Blitter: it is already used by other pipelines, and refactoring our existing passes so that they use it instead of cmd.Blit is in our short-term roadmap. This might also include modifying and improving the Blitter API to accomodate any URP requirements. So expect some changes soon in this area

on top of the RTHandles availability issue, which make SRP Blitter not usable on versions < 22.1, there are still scenarios where you might be better off writing your "custom blit" using DrawMesh, like the how-to page shows.

SRP Blitter will be improved in the future to facilitate URP adoption, but for now for example you are unable to do things like setting explicitly Load/Store actions if you are optimizing for mobile.
With DrawMesh you could also write easily generic full screen quad renderers, which don't necessaily need to blit a source texture to a destination one: as an example, a very common pattern currently for post processing effect doing similar stuff (i.e. ColorGradingLUT) is to call cmd.Blit(null, RT). This is not the best use of blit and works much better with a simple draw to full screen quad mesh.

Other examples of useful custom blit implementation could be something like the URP CopyDepth pass, where you need to add some extra MSAA resolve logic so your shader could use Tex2DMS samples based on whether the source texture is MSAA'd or not.

The SRP Blitter will be extended and improved to cover more use cases over time, but DrawMesh will always give you fulll flexibility and customization if needed.

TL;DR: Use SRP Blitter if what you need to do is available and implemented in that API, use the DrawMesh approach for any other cases, avoid cmd.Blit() 

Link:

Feedback - Documentation and/or a Unity blog post on how to Blit in URP -- and what every Blit function does - Unity Forumhttps://forum.unity.com/threads/documentation-and-or-a-unity-blog-post-on-how-to-blit-in-urp-and-what-every-blit-function-does.1211508/How to perform a full screen blit in Single Pass Instanced rendering in XR | Universal RP | 12.1.4https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@12.1/manual/renderer-features/how-to-fullscreen-blit-in-xr-spi.html?_ga=2.19647224.1381759709.1644198124-1935516838.1625024991