How to reduce overdraw for mobile when making a 2d side scroller?

Hello,
I am currently making a 2d, side scrolling, endless runner game. The game is very near completion, and runs great on iPhone5 and Samsung S5, but once the game is put on a larger mobile device, such as iPad3 or Galaxy Tab4, the framerate is horrible.

After several days of spelunking into the depths of the internet, and after countless hours of changing where my code to move my player, camera, scrolling backgrounds, etc is updated(update,fixed, late,etc), I have come to understand the painful lesson of overdraw on mobile devices.

When using sprites and textures with alpha, the same pixel is drawn for every layer, every frame. This is a pretty hard limit on mobile gpus that are pushing 7 and 10 inch screens.

So I guess now that I know the problem, I can't seem to find any straightforward information on how to fix this.

How are some of you handling things like infinite scrolling backgrounds and sprites on mobile for 2d games? I have read to use meshes, but have also found information on how to do this pretty scarce.


Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks!

 

Okay dude, after 20 hours I did something that helped me, I hope it will do the same for your project.

I went to main camera and changed from Skybox to Don't Clear and changed Rendering Path to forward. It increased FPS to 60.

If it helps, let me know.

Best luck.

 

thank you for the reply but unfortunately this did not work.

 

Bump. Anyone?

 

I need to know how to reduce overdraw... How do I convert my sprites to meshes and use them instead? How do I tackle an infinite scrolling background without overdraw? Did i pick the wrong game engine to make a 2d game? I started learning unity about 8 months ago and love it, but now that i'm putting my 2d projects on mobile devices the usually very helpful community has been silent. I have made several posts in multiple categories and have gotten few answers at all.

 

maybe something in optimisation tipps
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MobileOptimisation.html

 

What do u mean by "background". Is your background just one sprite? or multiple sprites? Can you show some code on how you scroll them? or at least how you do it.. You shouldn't have any kind of overdraw for background..

 

I don't make backgrounds as sprites, they are textures. I create an empty quad, and then paste a background (as texture) to it. Is that what you are looking for ?

And indeed, these forums seems dead. I usually go to reddit.

 

My background is three quads, using a script to offset the texture. Yes, I am using textures on my backgrounds, on quads. The problem is that these textures still have lots of alpha. According to the overdraw tool in the scene view, they are causing overdraw.

 

If the textures on the quads use transparency you get overdraw, at least that is how it appears in unity.

 

All relevant code is here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/is...-2d-scrolling-background.381353/#post-2477038

 

What my overdraw is looking like^^



What the same scene is looking like.

As you can see below, transparent geometry is killing my performance. Camera.Render (specifically render.transparentGeometry), and Graphics.PresentAndSync go back and forth fighting for the top spot.

Unfortunately, the GPU part of the profiler is giving me an error and I cannot seem to use it, but I think the below data from the CPU readings is enough to say that transparency is killing my game performance on tablets.

 

Bump. With no clear way to move forward this has basically halted the production of this game. We cannot release with this sort of performance on tablets and we do not want to release only on phones.

So sad. We thought we were ready to release, minus tidying up some menu screens and adding admobs.

At this point we are considering posting a job on upwork to see if anyone will share some knowledge.

 

try one scene in older unity version, I have read new versions have perfomance problems. Your screen is not looking realy hard for old gpu.

I have noticed, my samsung s1 dont like big size sprites, so i am trying keep them at 1024.