An exercice to increase framerate

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to push up the frame rate in the following situation:

*one directional light
*10,000 spheres placed at random with no shadows (nor casting or receiving) and a diffuse shader with only a color specified. The spheres have no rigidbodies and no colliders.
*the camera is put in a position where all the spheres can be seen at the same time.

Things I have tried
*using an unlit shader with as texture a simple unicolor png file. It was effective in increasing the framerate.
*replacing the spheres by planes. This made things worse (so a sphere is easier to render than a plane?)
*replacing the spheres by quads. No difference. We do however save A LOT by batching in this case, although this does not change the framerate.
*adding a simple script to make every quad billboarding the camera (why do I do that, well because with a sphere it does not matter from where you look at it, something not true for a quad except if you make it billboard the camera) made things very bad => we are better off using spheres in this case.

I feel stuck at this point. I have 10,000 spheres with no rigidbodies or colliders. I have an unlit shader with a unicolor png file. What I can I do from here to increase the framerate? I was convinced that having quads billboarding the camera with a texture of a circle on it would be better, but even with only a squared unicolor quad (thus no circle on the quad yet), the billboarding routine seems much more expensive than drawing spheres.

Please throw away any suggestion and I will test it and tell you if it worked.

 

Use the profiler to tell you where the bottleneck is, then focus on that.

--Eric

 

Didn't know about the profiler.

On the GPU side: Camera.Render 100% = 60% RenderTexture.SetActive + 39.4% for drawing.
On the CPU side: Camera.Render 97.2% = 81.6% Drawing and 15.4% Culling.

What now? Any tips (or suggestion for reading)?

 

I guess you want to exercise, right ?
You could try your hand at the Viking village project instead, it could prove more educational.

 

I don't know what that is, but be sure I'm going to check that out

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/viking-village-demo-available-from-the-asset-store.298943/
Give it a try.