5.6.0b4: Debugging your batches with Frame Debugger

People always say Unity's dynamic / static batching is a black box. There are tons of rules that you need to bear in mind for batching to work, but even if you seemingly honor each and every rule listed on the manual page, sometimes you still get broken batches, and there is little you could do to debug this.

So in 5.6.0b4 we added a piece of information to draw call events in Frame Debugger that tells you why a draw call can't be batched with the previous one.

Here is a simple example to show you how it works:

We have two cubes that could be dynamically batched if they weren't using different materials. If you select the second draw call, there is this new information on the right side panel telling you why they can't be batched. In this case, it's because they use different materials.

This case might be too obvious for you to be needing a tool to tell the reason, but there are more non-trivial, 'hidden' reasons a batch can break in Unity. Currently in 5.6 beta 4 frame debugger can detect 25 different batch break causes in various places in our forward, deferred and shadow render loops.

We hope this little addition to frame debugger can ease your pain when trying to debug batching problems in Unity. Try it with your scenes and tell us what you think about it. Moreover, any feedback regarding frame debugger / general diagnostics tooling around graphics is welcome in this thread.

 

Frame debugger always has this function (pinging object in Hierarchy window) as far as l can remember. If it doesn't work that way, it's a bug.