Optimizing Large Quantity of UI GameObjects.

Hey there!

I'm building an incremental game in Unity where almost every thing in the game is in the UI. This means I have several lists of many many GameObjects, (hundreds of upgrades) spread across multiple tabs, and this seems to slow down the game a lot.

I am caught between two solutions:
1) Enable/Disable GameObjects when a tab is not in use. This puts my FPS to about 200, so pretty fast, but it chugs a bit more when swapping between views. A noticeable lag-spike occurs. Triggering a bunch of OnEnable/OnDisable on UI objects being the likely culprit.
Because of the above problem, I've searched for optimization techniques, and found the below solution.
2) Enable/Disable Canvas behaviors. Instead of the disabling the entire object, just disable the parent canvas and using some custom render groups to minimize my script `Update` calls. This speeds up switching between Tabs quite a bit, however the FPS now floats at around 100, so half the speed.

My question is this: is it possible to get the best of both solutions? AKA, telling unity to ignore a large chunk of the GameObject hierarchy without a lag spike when you enable and disable them?

Thanks!

 

Use CanvasGroup component with alpha 1 or 0 to turn things off.

 

That is essentially what I'm doing. Its just the vast number of objects still weigh down the game when they are enabled but not visible.