Help getting 60FPS

Hello,

I am an independent developer working on a small game by myself. I am having some issues with frame rate. Using 1.0f/ Time.smoothDeltaTime I am monitoring my frame rate. In the editor I get around 60FPS and it runs smooth. However, when I create a build I only get around 30FPS and it seems choppy. I set the target frame rate to 60 in the script, so I am not sure why this is happening. Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

The framerate cannot be set, this only is a cap. So if the application cannot reach that speed then it will obviously not run at that speed. If it's faster in the editor it is likely due to the fact it's not rendering as high a resolution.

High resolutions will cause the computer to do more work, so more work takes a longer amount of time.

The solution is not to cap anything, and code your game to be framerate independent.

You also need to learn how to code with delta time, there's a lot of resources on this, so your game becomes "framerate independent".

This is basic stuff the learn tutorials go over, plus a whole number of youtube videos and so forth. All games have this, and it's essentially multiplying any values that will change over time by Time.deltaTime so that the movement becomes consistent regardless of hardware, or options.

 

Thanks for the response. I am aware of deltaTime and FixedUpdate and I am using those for movmement based calculations.

I thought maybe I had too many lights in my scene, deactivated all of them and made a new build, but my framerate did not increase.

 

Obviously not because you are guessing. What slows down the CPU is not going to be the same thing that slows down the GPU. You should also use the profiler.

Typically if the performance changes quite a bit with resolution it will be shader complexity or bandwidth.

 

I saw in another post that you said not to use Unity UI. Should I just create my own UI elements without using a canvas? Do you think that could be part of my problem?

 

Please be careful with advice with game development, it's extremely specific to the version of unity, the situation for that particular game and so on.

Perhaps you could show a few profiler screenshots and explain a bit more about your game, such as the pipeline and so on... also if you turn off vsync in Unity's player options (in the editor menu) you can properly see the framerate - it may be that it's running at 50fps but because of vsync, it's got no choice but to run at 30.

 

Well, maybe I am worrying about this frame rate issue too early in the project, because it is not close to finished yet. However, I wanted to make sure that I could solve this problem so that I don't do all this work for nothing.So I decided to monitor the issue and research solutions.

Maybe it's got something to do with opaque geometry?
Edit: These screenshots of the profiler were taken with the game running in the editor with vsync enabled.

 

Here is screenshots of the profiler with data recorded from the development build, with vsync enabled.

 

You know you can click on profiler graph, to actually get snapshot of time frame? This way you would see CPU usage percentage. Much easier to track issues.

 

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Should I click on the graph to see data for that point? Or are you saying that there is a "graph" option that I can click to view the data differently?

 

What I mean, you can click on profiler graph, to select time on time line. So you will see vertical line moving, with tooltips times next to it. This will automatically display relevant data below. So basically you can drag/click that vertical line/pointer.

Also, if you scroll down your profiler, below you will find GPU usage. Somewhere below memory.

However, your scene don't seams to be near demanding. What target device you are testing on?

 

Oh ok, yes I noticed that. No, my scene isn't very demanding. Low poly models and low res textures. I am developing for PC.

 

Here is an image of the profiler GPU data from my development build. Opaque geometry seems to be my biggest issue.

 

Yep finally we see more what is going on.
Why you have over 300 renderer calls?
Can you put textures into atlases?

 

I am not sure why there are over 300. I have never put textures in an atlas before. I am unfamiliar with this practice.

EDIT: An atlas is similar in concept to s sprite sheet?

 

Basically you have multiple textures in one image.
Then using offset UV, to get correct texture for a mesh.

 

Ok I will try this. Do I need to do this with normal maps and emissive textures too?

Also, does this mean that Unity basically can't handle more than a handful of textures at a time? I don't understand why this is necessary. I expected that Unity could handle a couple of dozen textures at a time, but I guess not?

 

On modern PC with dedicated card shouldn't be an issue. But is hard to deduct what else is going on in your project, for such slow down. I suspect something else in opaque, costing your GPU.

Do you use material instancing? (tick box)

 

I hadn't been using it; but I just tried it and it did not seem to improve the frame rate on the development build that I made afterwards. Still, it is probably best that I leave it checked, so I will.
I am running on a fairly new gaming laptop which has a GTX 1060.

My scene is largely made of quads, could this be an issue?

 

Just wonder, did that scene from a screenshot, with vending machine, renders 300 material calls?
If so, for such simple scene, is far too much.

 

Yes, the data in the profiler is from that same scene.

Perhaps it could be related to how many GUI elements I have on my canvas? They are hidden in that image, but I have many GUI elements with alpha transparencies. They are inactive until needed.

 

Then definitely you have some incorrect approach taken there, In terms of objects, and/or materials.

You should review, what is going on. Check I is culling active, if in case you have some objects rendered behind walls, or outside camera frustum.

But if that only objects in your scene what we see, then need review.

Do you use multiple materials per object by any chance?

 

I have baked occlusion culling. I am not using multiple materials on anything.

 

If you select all visible object on the scene from a picture, how many objects is there?

 

I do not know how to determine the exact number of objects.

 

Here is an image of the scene in the editor. If there is some way to get a count of the objects without having to do it manually or write a script, I do not know.

 

Unfortunatelly you would need write script, to count objects. However is rather small, as uses transfor.GetChildrenCount () or something similar. There is few topic on that subject if interested.

However, by screenshot, I may suspect.lights to be an issue.
Check this topic
https://forum.unity.com/threads/10x-more-draw-calls-with-mixed-lighting-on-static-objects.625360/
To see, if that gives you any clue.

 

Use frame debugger to find out what's actually being rendered in the current frame. You can connect it to the build as well.

By selecting a draw call in debugger, it will show you why it's not batched.

Note that modern PC's can easily render more than 3k+ batches (depending on the texture size). Though, if you can decrease it, you probably should.

Also, Gaming laptops do not exist. Well, not unless they fall in absurdly costly category.

By the way, make sure you're not running your application on the integrated GPU instead of actual discrete one, because 300 batches are way too low to significantly drop GTX 1060 performance, albeit mobile one.

Keypoints:
- If it's less than 300 verts / submesh - use dynamic batching;
- If the target is PC or something better than potato - use GPU instancing, as that will reduce draw calls.
- Transparent UI still renders. So make sure to disable the actual object if it's full trasparent.
- Use deferred rendering path to draw multiple lights without major performance hits.

 

Thanks for the information. I will have to double check and be sure it is not using the integrated GPU. I will definitely look into the frame debugger more. I am learning alot about optimization now. I will keep looking for a solution. I wish they had taught us this stuff in college lol.

 

Yes, I suspected the lights as well, because I need to work on that still. However, I did create a build with all of the lights deactived and the frame rate was still low. I will continue to look for solutions. I am researching different types of optimization now.

 

I am going to try batching my mesh and see if that gives me some improvement.

 

It turns out I wasn't running the application on the dedicated GPU. I feel a bit foolish for not realizing that sooner. I looked into this problem to see if there is some way to get unity to automatically use the dedicated GPU, but I found no way to do this. Many people seem to have an issue with this, having to tell users to manually switch over themselves. Does anyone know about any solutions to this issue? Is there a way to ensure that unity will run using the dedicated GPU instead of the integrated GPU?

 

Look into the bios at startup if there is an option to exclude the integrated GPU.

 

I am unable to find any such option. This thread describes the issue that I think I'm having.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/3vn2kd/can_i_get_unity_to_use_my_dedicated_graphics_card/

 

You can actually make a custom shortcut to set it to use a certain gpu , I cant remember the exact command line text you need to add but it is possible, we use this to force usage of GPU 2 on our work machines

 

Open Nvidia Control Panel -> Global Settings -> Set the gpu to the discrete one there.

 

Yes, this sounds like what I need to figure out. If you are talking about the build, and not in the editor.

 

1. you are profiling in editor where it is already 60fps and your complaint was that it's slow for standalone builds

2. you are 3-4ms on GPU, this is tiny. There are 16ms available for a 60fps game so likely the GPU is not really the problem but the CPU is consuming so much that the GPU doesn't have much of a window to finish it's work. This, plus vsync is what is likely driving your framerate down.

Stop focusing on the GPU it's really unlikely now I've seen it's taking 3-4ms.

3. Look at CPU timings. Sort by time millisec, not %

 

I did profile the development build, as I had mentioned previously.
Like I said, the problem seems to be that the standalone build was using integrated GPU instead of dedicated GPU. I had to manually select my dedicated GPU when I ran the build. Once the build was running on the dedicated GPU, the frame rate was good and it ran smooth.

My problem now is that I need the build to automatically run on the dedicated GPU without the end user having to select this manually.

 

Yes but even so, 3-4ms is not a lot, so it means you do have CPU perf issues.

 

It will, if user decides to run on it.

There's no way to force it, unless I'm missing something.

 

Yes, I don't want the user to have to decide. I would expect that it should naturally choose the better GPU. I don't know why that is not the case. It seems like there may not be a solution for this though.

 

No I meant the editor. I don’t think you can force the build and why would you want to, you will not know what slot your users will consider their “main” gpu

 

It's cropped up a few times over the years in forums, might be worth a search.

 

I think it's more related on how Nvidia handles new games. It might be worth contacting the them, maybe they'll add your game to their library to automatically pick which GPU to use.

Although, it would be better if it was automatically done for any Unity runtime instance instead.

Same comes to AMD, but it's way worse. Sometimes their drivers completely fail to even allow to pick which GPU should be used (for apps on laptops).

 

Intel's been problematic too and they have the majority market share here by a very, very large margin.

AFAIK with the proper drivers installed most people can just select gpu via menu.

 

I have been searching for information about this. I found one thread that was relevant.

In the thread people said that they had customers refunding the game because it was running slow. The customers didn't realize that they had to manually set the GPU. I do not want this to happen to me if I finish my game. I don't want people to return the game just because it wasn't running on the best possible GPU. There must be a way for Unity to identify the best possible GPU and use it.

 

You're thinking in a reverse manner. It's not a Unity's problem, it's hardware manufacturer's one.
I don't think there's a way to enforce GPU usage outside of OS security ring.


If it's that imporant - make a special notification for the laptop users. But I don't think its that big of deal.
If Unity's runtime running on a wrong GPU - probably the rest of the applications will encounter the same issue, as this is a global setup thing.
(Although this issue somewhat reduced by Nvidia's game library and other companies similar solutions)

Also, get a game running first. Then think about what troubles some minority may encounter.
Users lack of knowledge should be mitigated by users, not machines.

 

Yeah, it is starting to seem like this is a problem that is beyond my control. I just don't want users to ask for refunds or give bad reviews over this problem.

 

You should look at how AAA titles deal with it. Pretty much every game's faq section has a bit about integrated gpus with the advice to switch it to "high performance" or similar option.

What you can do is detect the hardware on the machine and pop a little message up to advise the user on startup.

Spoiler