Performance on IOS Metal with unity 4.6.2p2

I was really looking forward to try this but my to my surprise the performance was dreadful.

I have a frame rate counter in the game( based on 1/Time.deltaTime )which is happily displaying 60fps even though it certainly doesn't feel like that in game.

The game is running fine with 64bit 4.6.2p1 il2cpp...so unless there is something else in the patch release that affects the performance...this seems to be related to metal...either directly or maybe through some of my shaders that might not play nicely with it.

How has this performed for you guys?

 

Have you run and compared results with the flag enabled and disabled?

I tried it enabled and didn't notice a change - good or bad - but this app pegged at 60 anyway...

 

Just tried it...so enabling openGL instead gives back the frames so seems to be something with metal...xcode frame rate counter gives me between 39-60 fps with metal.

Disabled the metal frame debugger which is enabled by default.. as according this apple article:

https://developer.apple.com/library...rammingGuide/Dev-Technique/Dev-Technique.html

That gave me some more frames but still there seems to be some apparent slow downs especially when rendering the semi transparent particles like smoke.

 

Metal doesn't help with transparency, it helps with draw calls and stuff like that. You get more CPU time back.

If your performance is bad, file a bug. Forum can't help.

 

I was curious about the impact metal had on another users projects before starting to dig deeper.. and yeah... if I find out that there is no general issue and I'm not doing anything weird on my end I'd file a bug.

 

My initial observation with 4.6.2p2 was a very stuttery camera movement when Everyplay is enabled, although the frame rate is still 60fps. So, I switched back to 4.6.2p1 which is fine right now.

 

Did you also try the switching from metal to OpenGL in player settings?

 

That could certainly explain the sluggishness as my environment uses static batching, my project is quite big but I could split of an environment slice and put a camera on path or something if that would be of help.

 

@Alexey so are you saying that the game will run better if we turn off static batching completely in Unity 4.6.x?

 

Is it because of something inherent to the way metal works, or something with Unity's implementation?

(in other words, to get it fixed, do we need to bug Apple, or you? )

 

My game appeared to have slightly lower fps/performance when set to metal on my iPhone6.
Where as the default settings/automatic which works for iPhone4 and 6 provided better performance on the iPhone 6 >_< ?
Isn't metal supposed to be better, if not a lot better at least not worser? O_O

Edit : Just read all the posts above, summary : looking forward to Unity 5 and its metal improvements ^_^ keep up the good work Unity team!

 

Awesome.. I took it out for a spin and it still seems like metal is still lagging behind... =(

This is the open GL performance:


And the metal:


The scene is running on iPad mini with retina display and has about 130 Draw calls..I'm using ngui for the GUI.

I can clearly see that one of the biggest cost is the trig functions (sin/cos( Time) ) in the ocean shader.. If that is what ultimately sinks it or is something else in the metal rendering that makes the difference.

One interesting thing is that the combined time is pretty much the same...just that the gpu is doing more work while the cpu is having a cup of tea for 2 milliseconds or so..

 

It certainly does give the CPU more time... I have saved the GPU traces grabbed with the frame capture inside Xcode..is that enough for repro or should I do the extract mini project?

I guess the good thing here is that if I can manage to knock back the ocean shader I'll be hopefully fine...unless there are other issues at play.. I read about caching trig functions in lookup textures so I'm just writing a small script to render out sin/cos functions onto a texture..see how that helps

 

Submitted new bug with repro (676404). The performance has improved in 4.6.3p1 for some of our scenes but the spikes still make it generally worse than ES2/ES3.

 

Yes, seems like the sine functions are not killing it as I tried an even harsher optimisation which was removing the ocean altogether...weirdly that didn't save the day, based on the frame capture where xcode showed my the shader and percentage of time spent on the sine/cosine functions as shown below



Performance remained still poor without the ocean, around the same mark, then I attacked the fillrate by testing lowering the resolution ( 768p ) instead of the native retina. Still no happiness...

 

Did the fix land in 4.6.3p2? I see no mention in release notes.

 

Hi Alexey, we are in desperate need for a Metal fix this week. We are getting major framerate spikes with Metal on (and use static batching heavily in our game). Any chance this is coming out this week?

 

Subsidiary question from me: Will this be pulled over to Unity 5?

We're currently dropping to 60% of the framerate when switching from ES 3 to Metal...

 

I posted this in another area because it was specific to unity5 but check this out.
In unity 5 it gets even weirder. I know they are working on it.

from other post below here:

The Huge problem is it's very difficult to even release right now with unity5.
Automatic breaks A7 chip performance. 3.0 is great but cuts off alot of devices like iphone5 iPad mini (which is popular still)

This part gets even weirder.
On unity 5 force openGL 3.0:
will run on non openGL 3.0 devices. Looks amazing but i can't release on older devices.

On unity 4.6.xxx forcing openGL 3.0:
will run on older devices and honestly is the best framrate I have ever seen with unity period. No jitters at all.This makes no sense since it's making the framerate amazing on even a 4s. Ive been using since it came out and I have never gotten such good results.


If "automatic" could use 3.0 instead of metal as an additional option I feel this would be simply amazing!

 

With unity 4 forcing openGL3.0 still lets you at least install on all devices(in fact runs better than selecting 2.0 even a iPhone 4s). On unity 5 if you select 3.0 it blocks anything under an A7 from installing.


-And I know you guys (Unity) are on it. Im just sharing my experience for others to compare. I know i thought i was losing it at first.

 

Right, that makes sense. But Its clearly not just falling back on older devices.
On unity 4.6.xxx, Even on somethign like an ipad 2 or iphone 4s if you select "froce 3.0" the frame rate is about double than selecting 2.0

I know those devices don't even support 3.0.
So, what else is happening when you select force opengl 3.0 that boosts framerate so much on devices that dont even support it? It's like Unity's full potential has been locked until i selected force 3.0.

 

Hey Alexey, any updates on the metal fix? We are in a tough spot and just looking for an ETA on when we can get this fixed. Thanks!

 

Hey Alexey, I just testing the lastest 4.6.3p3 release and we are still having major Metal performance problems. Are there any other fixes coming soon? We are in pretty desperate need to get Metal enabled in our build.

Thanks,
Paul

 

Here is our bug but our project is huge. We will try to pair down the scene to get it uploaded if that is what it takes.

http://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?679259_6j0kfu0gdnmgejs3

Thanks,
Paul

 

Marmoset shaders use texCUBElod()

 

btw: I don't know if that is an issue in 4.6 too but lod of a render texture does not work in Unity 5 when metal is used.

 

Actually I can't see anymore who started to talk about marmoset in this thread, I just answered that they indeed use texCUBElod()

Just uploaded it - Case 681081 - it looks like the mip maps are somehow lost in metal, using tex2Dlod() only the original texture size works and mips result in black.

Difference OpenGL ES 3 vs Metal:

 

Thanks, that works.

 

Just my two cents here. We are using 4.6.4p4 and we get 15fps less with metal than OpenGL on iPad Air 2. Metal is still behind in our case, so we will keep using OpenGLES 2.0.

 

It seems metal seems to be working not consistently on Apple devices - you would expect get same results on devices throughout but this is not the case, also using 4.6.4p4 - We need a status update on if there further plans to tweak Metal.
Not tested with Unity 5.