Performance drop from 4.5 to 4.6?

Hi there Uniteers, recently we moved our game project from 4.5 to 4.6. By doing so, we have experienced an increase in performance ranging from 15-25% depending on use cases. Investigating the profiler doesn't show anything out of the ordinary. Our game consist nearly only of particle emitters, and is suppose to run on mobiles and tablets.

Performance controlled using unity 4.5 used GUI implemented using the 2D sprite system
Performance controlled using unity 4.6 used GUI implemented using the new uGUI system.

Have anyone experienced anything similar? Could it be the new uGUI system, or a change in the way particle systems are handled in 4.6?

Application running using Unity 4.5 on an iPhone 4


Application running on unity 4.6 on an iPhone 4


Profiler for the game using Unity 4.6 profiling on a HTC one

 

Im sad to say but each version of Unity brings different performance to mobile devices especially always ios platform. Its sumfin not discussed or avoided by Unity team members, i noticed this as i been on forums long time each day and have all apple devices to test on..just wish the qa had some performance tests! But it will take one clever qa to make a complex test script for this...

 

I can't really take part in that debate, because I don't have the necessary knowledge. What I can say is, that I now have tried comparing unity 4.5 with 4.6 on my HTC One, and there are no significant difference in performance between the two. I'll see if I can get my hands on my personal iPhone (The one used for benchmark is another member of the project group), so i can do some testing myself, because this is an interesting topic.

 

Thanks for checking, my assumption about ios being effected maybe right, not noticed any changes between android myself and simply cannot test windows and blackberry as they have small number devices..I think its just hard keep up with xcode changes and apple always updating ios version and making api updates... I think tommorow Apple announce ios8 and xcode 6 - so there be plenty work to do and I be straight to xcode 6

 

Sorry for the late response. Better late than never I guess. Yes, I changed our GUI implementation from using NGUI to using the new 4.6 GUI instead, and this bias can surely be the sole reason for the performance increase. But this increase is already experienced when the game enters the start menu, which consist of 3 sprites, one of which use an animation for rotation. To me, this seems like a drastic increase, based on the quantity of GUI elements, but I know biased information isn't fruitful for luring out issues in the beta build. (Which I should have thought of before opening this thread). I'll perform additional testing asap, with two identical versions of our game in order to provide a non biased perspective.

However, based on the information provided a question remains. Both the iPhone and the HTC One were using the same two builds for testing, the 4.5 build using NGUI and the 4.6 build with unity's GUI. The iPhone indicated a reduction in performance, while the HTC One didn't. I know, between the 4.5 and 4.6 changes have occured, but it was expected that both mobile would display the same change of performance, however they didn't. This could possibly be explained by the fact that performance on the iPhone was compared tested using Xcode while the performance on the HTC One were tested using Unity's profiler. This could also be a plausible reason. Will take a me some time before I can test on the iPhone again, because I don't own a iPhone myself, but a partner of mine does.

 

Not related maybe but maybe a little bit related...

I am in the process of porting a game from Cocos2D (v2.1) to Unity (4.6). I have never touched Unity before so have no idea about performance on 4.5 and so on. But what I've seen so far, and this bothers me a lot because I'll be the one who has to optimise, is that performance is really bad on Unity on device - even testing on a iPhone 6 Plus. If any optimisations won't work in the end we might have to change rendering engine again. Btw I didn't make the decision to use Unity... (I would never have at this point to be honest, although I don't think Unity is only bad, it's just still nowhere near the mature 2D rendering engines). That said I still have sprite batching to do... hope it helps.

 

I have the same problem after using unity 4.6 with new ui system. After using new ui system i have really big lags on iPhone 4. New i can't decide if i should return back to old ui system or not. Actually new ui system gives me a lot of speed on coding but in this case it's useless.

 

So you changed the working NGUI made by people who have experience making games to a new and untested Unity 4.6 GUI made by people who are busy working on Unity 5 but had to throw something together because the promised it for so long?

I just can't see why there would be any problems!

BTW why did you change the GUI if it worked?

 

Do you use spritesheets for uGUI?

 

Well, I can't really remember what all the fuzz was about, and I don't believe its relevant any longer since Unity 4.6 have gone from beta to release, a wide range of changes have properly occured.