Unity 5.3 Performance issues

I still get vast performance hits at random without any GUI elements in the scene, in a previously perfectly smooth performance in v5.1.1.f1 in the same scene. The GUI is generally very consuming as well though.

 

Performance issues are often regressions that are usually handled in the same way as bugs.

This thread is unfortunately like a bouquet. It is all about performance, but it consists of very different elements. If you have performance issues with the UI, it is far more useful to create a new thread with that particular subject and it is also more likely that a developer joins the conversation.

 

FYI, For the case I openned concerning rendering performances issue (particles/transparent things), unity answers me that the issue is linked to this one :
http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/gear-vr-performance-drop-in-5-dot-3-0f3-when-dynamic-batching-is-on-compared-to-5-dot-3-0f2 that will be fixed on 5.3.1
Let's wait !
Hope this helps you not to invest too much time digging to solve this.

BTW : any idea for 5.3.1 release date ? I can't stay for now on 5.3 with my game running at 5fps but I would love to add multiscene on my current workflow (and test IAP out of the box!) !

 

I'm experiencing extreme performance drops in the new version (5.3) regarding particle systems too. Every time you see a spike in the graph below, the frame rate of the game freezes (jitters). Does anyone know why this is?
If I turn off all particle systems in my scene, I get normal performance.

 

One guess is the new multithreading system, which may bottleneck and create the issue. One solution to this would be to provide a full control of the threading for the particles to the users, otherwise there is no way to know how the threads will behave in all cases and with other threaded scripts.

Also there is mention of the transparent shaders, in general (outside of just particles), so this could be another cause, though my custom transparent shaders i use in InfiniGRASS work fine as they did in v5.2, so i cant tell why this may happen related to shaders.

I hope there is a patch to revert to the older systems soon so we can accuratly gauge the various systems's speed and then a release of the new systems as standalone separately, to make sure they wont interfere with the existing perfectly working ones (at least until they are as fast or faster than before).

 

Someone can test if the static batching is working on your project ?
On the mine it work on 5.2.3 but doesn't on 5.3.0 for the same project.

**Edit After deleting the point light in my scene, it's working again or by creating a new scene without point light

 

You dont get it, i have no performance issue with 5.1.2. but soon as i run same code or any UI for that matter wity 5.2+ the performance is generly bad. Hence no impact from my side, nor a bug.. A bug means something is wrong and should be corrected. Performance increase are usaly done by doing things differenelty not directly fixing bugs. Pretty big difference..

Other than that Unity is perfect..

 

Honestly, this is starting to worry me. When I first installed unity 4.4 I thought it was amazing, fast, fully featured. It was rad and I fell in love immediately. Everything did exactly what I expected. Now, fast forward to 5.2 -5.3, I can't work a single day without rage quitting because something crashed, something revealed a nasty caveat, major bugs, un-intuitive workflows, etc. More and more I'm considering checking out Unreal, but I'm already heavily invested into Unity. Grrrr. The updates come so fast I can barely keep up. The builds needs to spend a lot more time in QA, or QA needs an employee refresh. Especially when I upgrade from 5.1 to 5.2 and find that LITERALLY, and I mean LITERALLY every script reference on every prefab, both in directories and in scenes, had EVERY script referenced removed. Trying the same project again in a later 5.2 build and now I get errors about the masking no longer being supported and all my buttons don't work. I know it's off topic, but just showing that major, major issues crop up that should be caught in QA. This happens every time I update in unity. Something breaks like this. I wish I was exaggerating.

 

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READ ME!!!!!
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I just received an update on the bug report!!

First:Thank you so much to everyone who submitted reports, they really do help. To those of you who can't, this isn't a shaming. I totally understand and its okay to say "i can't for reasons"

UPDATE:
1. The performance issue is intermittent so its difficult to track down exactly.
2. The dynamic batching issue is reproducible on stock android build every time.

The QA assigned works from the same office as me and is the best of the best! He said there is a fix but he doesn't know the exact schedule. He pinged the dev to get that answer (dev is in Europe) I'll keep you all in the loop!

cc: @rstorm000

 

Unity should still be a lot better than trying to handle C++, but i agree that Unity 5 should focus on polishing the existing features than bring new things and break older ones in the process.

The particle system was working great up to v5.2, i dont understand why there was a need to change this system so much to the point of breaking it completly.

Another thing that was working perfectly in v4.3 was the way scripts were overriten on import, after this version when a script is both moved to another directory and changed in content wont get replaced by an imported package. This can break all connections to the new script and keep only the ones of the old scripts, if for example you changed the code in one script in an asset and try the update it with a new version. The only fix is manually copying the code of the new duplicate scripts, while in v4.3 you could just overwite everything and then do the changes only to the scripts of interest.

 

i reverted back to 5.2 after my builds on android using 5.3 went from 60fps to 30 fps ...
there is something in profiler appearing like "Shadows.CallBacks" or something eating up performance.

 

Please start testing Unity on bigger projects, we hit more and more bugs with every new unity release. Even the new job system + multi threading seems to be hogging systems down instead of improving performance.

I will happily share my project Night Crisis to this end but would need a point of contact to work together on these Unity bugs

 

Please start testing Unity on MOBILE projects...! Because Android performance issues not solved since 5.2 and we gone through a whole cycle.

 

It's not just android suffering, I'm getting poor results on iOS too.

 

something i forgot to mention earlier as well, unity should focus on testing on mobiles (mainly android and IOS) before anything else.. performance is most important thing in these platforms

 

Here's a quick test on a Arch Viz project. I started the project with 5.0, kept it updated since then, now with 5.3. In the screenshot, the bottom screen uses Legacy OpenGL, the top screen uses OpenGL Core. So yes, performance is worse. CustoMac, GTX 760, OS X.11.2.

Also notice that the Speed Tree is garbled.


And yeah, just like others posted the particle system or transparency is causing some weird spikey slowdowns and less FPS in general. In this scene the only particle systems I have going are pollen for the grass, and if I turn those off FPS are better (but not as good as in 5.2) and no slowdowns.

 

Your speedtree is garbled because it needs it's materials regenerated. Click on it in the project window, and then select to regenerate the materials in the inspector.

 

I think I get it now. You are referring to changes in Unity 5.2 and not in 5.3. Due to the title of this thread, I made this naive assumption.

In that case, the performance issue you are having is a regression between Unity 5.1 and 5.2. Regressions are usually taken seriously by Unity. Of course there were a lot of changes in Unity 5.2 for the UI, e.g. by multi-threading parts of it. The goal of those was to improve the performance. If they didn't achieve that for certain cases, I am sure they consider it as regression.

Now there is one mayor issue that Unity has. They need to know in which cases the UI performance got worse.

 

yes exactly. I was hoping this was better in 5.3 but its not.

GUI in games are very important, and i do love the new way of working with UI and canvas, just we can't have this bad performance going on with UI. Agree?

 

So there is a regression between 5.1 and 5.3. That means, you can submit a bug report and write that there is a performance issue, more precisely a regression. Like that, Unity will be able to have a look at the problem, they can identify what is going on and eventually resolve the issue. Like this, you can actively help Unity to resolve an issue they unintentionally introduced.

 

No. The performance issue with canvas, is of a engine architecture nature, not scripting logic from the user side, read all the post from ppl claming poor UI performance after 5.2. Its obvious and not a bug report thing, unless Unity wants to ignore all the obvious report on the forum and every feedback has to go over bug report. Then it should be renamed feedback report, not bug report.

 

Unity treats performance regressions as bugs, as you can e.g. see here:
http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/terrain-tree-culling-performance-regression

 

So, TLDR: multi threaded game engines are very difficult across 25 platforms. Bug reports fix things far faster than having a good moan.

 

Well the logic is out of scope. There should be section :
- Report a bug or compiler error
- Report performance issue
- Report Editor issue
- Report Shader issue
etc.

(i understand the reporting is important to track down the source of the issue, but some times you need to take the bigger picture and look in to the architecture)

 

If I had know that this is just a "I know it better" thing, I would never have replied!!!

 

Sorry what is there to know better about here? We are talking about reporting an issue, and general poor performance that many people are experiencing after 5.2.

 

It must be allot better for the developers to track down issue, if reports where coming in in the right section and not every thing in "bug report" . Agree?

also check out this thread that is pretty much related.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/very-poor-performance-on-android-after-upgrading-to-unity-5.306572/

 

No, we've been over this. That's how things used to work. Turns out that it doesn't work anywhere near as effective as Unity's current system.

 

Why is it not effective? Every thing in 1 go, is more effective? And second question, why this performance not fixed in 5.3 ?

 

Because Unity has to stay true to the roadmap launch dates - the majority of customers want this. A patch is on the way.

Everything is not one go. There is a dedicated QA team that tests every single repro project and as they understand the inner workings far better than the guy reporting the bug, they can correctly assign it as opposed to some twit giving red herrings because he's used Unity for one week.

Anything else you don't understand?

 

I can see Unity 5.3 using 50-55% of my cpu capacity with nothing going on in editor mode, not runtime, (on my crappy coding laptop)

I started turning things off and on and found that unchecking "animated materials" move Unity cpu load from 55% to 2%. I have only like 8 gameobjects in scene, only one of them has more than ten triangles besides the 100x100 flattened terrain. There are no animated materials being used, no fancy shaders.

I don't know why, but I can hardly rotate with animated materials turned on.

addition:
it even does it with a brand new scene. nothing but a camera, a directional light, and nothing being selected. my cpu fluctuates between 11%-21% unless I turn off animated materials then it drops to 0%-1%

 

Noooooo! I thought i was safe. Using Unity 5.3 i have a pretty decent performance on my Android device (between 45-60 fps in the most important parts of the game. My game is UI heavy but ultra light in everything else and 2D). However, after testing in another Android device the game spend 70ms in gfx.waitforpresent and the UI is super glitchy.

Will try to send a bug report, but it will be useless if they test it in the wrong device. Hope they fix this soon

 

It's a Moto G generation I (working good), and LG G2 (working horribly). I had bad performance in all versions of Unity 5 with the LG, although in this one is worst and glitchy.

 

So is there some setting to toggle to improve performance for android devices?

I just upgraded to take advantage of iap and now performance is sooo bad on android. Its such a simple game with 5 draw calls and it heats up so fast and choppy framerates.

 

Another reason for all this bad performance trying to support too many platforms, which requires a larger QA team

Now that this comes to mind, there probaly isnt enough people doing QA

 

I don't have any problem in editor. But when I build my app and run on device(Exactly same app that I've build with 5.2 - Same device) fps dumps from 60 to 10. Does it solve performance issue on app running on device? when it's not connected to profiler!

 

You can really wonder right? But this started happing after 5.2 older version are fine. They should add a warning when updating to new version like "Warning, new version might be worse for your performance, but we did add new features".

 

new features? barely I downgraded to 5.1 and didn't miss anything

 

Is it possible to actually downgrade from 5.3 to 5.1. Are the scene & metafiles still backwards compatible?

 

yes

 

It can be told louder but not clearer.

 

We upgraded to unity 5.3 and now we are reverting back. The 5.3 messed up completely the android build. the performance is incredibly low.

 

Hi all,

I have the same issue on Android builds: I upgraded to Unity 5.3, and I now have less than half of FPS prior to upgrade (from 60 to 20 / 25 fps).
I use very little transparency, and there is no Unity GUI user interface elements involved in the scene.

 

This is what they tell you...don't wish to go oftopic but don't think what ever Unity say is 100 correct or 100 percent true..
The Android issues are present since the 5x sumfin releases...Surely there would be a massive board with a priority list.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/where-are-the-unity-performance-testers.356395/
Not one proper comment from Unity QA was given in this thread!

I think they lack resources to do internal testing...If beta testers dont find issues then its up to the customers...

If you know Android performance is poor so far, why allow yourselves to have same problem each release cycle, hence the need to push QA do better internal tests.

 

2015 is at the end and so is support for Unity 4.6.
Given that from what I read Unity 5 is still not at the level of Unity 4 regarding mobile, I hope they will delay phasing out U4 until U5 doesn't catch up.
I still haven't switched to Unity 5 and I see no reason yet, Unity 4 has more than enough features for everything I could dream of and the only reason to switch would be to solve issues with future IOS or Android version, but so far it seem kind of the opposite.

 

I posted about my issue with Android builds on Reddit and then found this thread.

I was porting my game from Windows to Android and immediately noticed FPS problem when running on my LG G3. It went from 60+ FPS I used to have to 8-10 FPS. I tried to change shaders, materials, settings, remove shadows etc. Pretty much destroyed everything in the process.

After that I created a new scene with nothing but approx 80 cubes (same material and 256x256 texture), no scripts, no skybox, no shadows, no UI, no anims, no movement, no particles - around 1.3k tris total. And got to ~40+ FPS (after switching from Standard shader). When I added around 20 more cubes with Standard shader, performance dropped to 10-20FPS.

My main menu scene has twice as much tris, uses at least 10 different materials, has scripts and UI ... it was 10-15FPS, but then I set everything as static, baked shadows and now it's running close to 60FPS (50-62 / 30-50 when I open UI panels).

Is it possible to install 5.2/5.1 without removing 5.3?


ETA: Switching to OpenGLES2 fixed the low framerate problem.

 

There was an issue with dynamic batching that should come out with the next patch.