Unity 5.3 Performance issues

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READ ME!!!!!
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Hi folks! I'm getting all the updates for you at the moment.

-I'm happy to hear some of you are seeing better performance.
-If you are still having performance issues, can you please submit a new bug and report the Bug # to me https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/bug-reporting
-Devs are investigating the AABB error. REF THIS THREAD -> http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/un...errors-invalid-aabb-result-isfinite-d.374926/
-I'm getting more info on the Triangles error UPDATE: “failed setting triangles” often is caused by lightmaps needing a rebake, because something has changed in mesh import UV generation.
(cc: @rstorm000 )

"Remember, I'm pullin for ya, we're all in this together" - Red Green

 

I upgraded to 5.2 to get lighting baked as the bug in 5.1 saturated the buffers and stalled out at task or number 11 every time.. I then tried 5.3 to try to get some framerate back as advertised for SpeedTree optimizations. I have now reverted to 5.1 and staying there till I hear good things about 5.3 or 5.4 or 5.5..or 6.x. This crap wears me out totally and demotivates me to the max. I should be five days farther down the road than I am. I hope I can get paid for Christmas. Clients don't like to hear what i have to tell them.. They just want what they contracted for done. CEO John. This is in your lap pal. Things were never this bad till you boarded the train. Maybe you can send me some money for Christmas presents for my son I haven't seen in 17 years.

 

Why doesn't Unity have some kinda log spam throttle option? This is always something I add to my log systems to ignore repeat messages in a configurable length of time. Whenever we have one of these useless errors that spam at us that we can't do anything about it would be nice if at least the messages themselves didn't kill performance and force me to use collapse in the log (which I hate).

 

Maybe if Unity actually sat down and tested whole game projects(free demos / asset store ) and not just relied on user reports, we would not have obvious issues like this every release..

 

It's just again an another proof that they don't test the engine before a release (like for the input caret....).

They work on new features and they try to fixe the errors from the previously release but the engine is not tested, so it will be the same every time.

It seem that unity wait after us (customers) to test and find the bugs .... Funny, when you see that you can reproduce most of bugs simply by testing the standard assets or free demo.

But no, it's seem again that they prefer receive a report issue number ... we are customers or testers?
Sound like we release a new game mode for our game before testing it ...

For my part, i will stop to lose my time on the forum and by testing the new release.
I will continue to work on the only stable version for me (5.1.3f1) and then in 2016, it will be time to see if the grass is more green somewhere else.

Losing my time on a broken produce or losing it by learning a new one, it will be the same but with more benefit for me.

 

Anyone tried UI performance yet? I wonder if canvas rendering is okay now.

 

I have spent thousands of dollars on Unity, not counting Asset Store purchases. Due to the current policy where Unity management have deemed release dates to be far, far more important than the quality of Unity as a product, Pro users effectively find themselves paying Unity for the questionable privilege of doing QA for them. It's clearly evident that Unity's own QA misses elementary things, such as the graphics being incorrect for an entire platform (case submitted and accepted).

Version numbers no longer mean anything, except to signal that anything ending in ".0", ".0f1", or even "p1", should be avoided at all costs. We're in a continuous stream of weekly builds, that's all.

It's true that all professional developers are gun shy updating in all known engines, especially towards the end of a project. However, as Unity Pro users, we're constantly torn between needing to upgrade to get rid of glaring engine bugs and not being able to upgrade (due to new bugs appearing in every single new release). It's not an easy situation, and I can't imagine the developers at Unity being comfortable with the situation – no professional would be.

I just hope Unity's desperate AAA race against UE4 won't cost Unity their user base. I like Unity, but things are still going in the wrong direction.

 

I think you summarized everything well, I do hope things get better however.

I think the only reason unity still has a user base (with all the recent engine bugs and lack of support) is because there is a free indie version.
I observed in the forum users expressing the same feelings that we have expressed to unity staff.

 

So true.

 

To me, this just always sounds like a justification for the engine developers to release crappy, untested updates. Why SHOULDN'T a person upgrade their engine mid-project in order to take advantage of new features? Isn't that the point of introducing new features? And aren't we ALL mid-project at any given time? Wouldn't that mean that essentially NO-ONE should upgrade to the newly released versions? And what IS "professional"?

 

I am usually gun shy about updating an engine on me games but unity forces you to update! Before anyone yells at me telling me you don't have to, let me say the whole 5.x has forced me to upgrade and patch EVERY week each time in he vain hope another bug killing my game or performance will be fixed this time. My latest game is so close to being finished yet 5.3 is still so terrible I need to keep waiting and patching until I'm happy the engine isn't going to let me down on mobile platforms.

If I hadn't spent so much time and money on unity over the last few years I'd jump ship now. In fact this might be my last game on unity, I currently feel I'd be better of writing my own engine!

 

Please do something about this. I get 3fps in my project, and 99.1% of the time in the profiler is spent in something called "overhead". It's completely unusable.

 

Can't connect with WebGL anymore i get missing script off it ?!

I don't know as much they fix problems they make double problems on the way :/

 

This is for android i try optimize and baking and so much still lag

 

How someone pointed out, I think the competition with Unreal 4 and the fact now Unity 5 (all features) is free, are causing a very harmful effect on the engine.

 

I personally feel the Unity QA are to blame here, they lacking performance testing before release and of course poor mobile testing.

All these problems would have been solved and fixed if there was some REAL/User projects tested/upgraded internally before each official Unity release. The same issue was raised when 5x came out. What is stopping Unity having multiple internal projects and these being cleverly upgraded throughout the release process. One would see the poor FPS drops on mobile, one would see the wrongly oriented splash screens, one would see the console errors.

Maybe its not a simple as above, but I sure not had one proper reason and explanation from Unity.
When the QA manager replies to some of the issues, each time I can see he gives up in the end because simply cannot handle some of the replies from the community members. No one is trying to attack anyone, but I think everyone is just tired of the SMALL things and bugs that keep happening. Each time they give some statistics to bugs fixed and some high numbers, maybe people need the important and noticeable bugs fixed first then you can boost about shoddy figures you want, no need to inflate them to prove such a good job is being done...IL2CPP bugs should not even count at all as this is new feature and its on going process so of course there be many, no need to pride your closed bugs with these.. Maybe next time say how many mobile performance bugs vs others been closed.

The worst thing is just time wasting, lots and lots of time wasting waiting each week for patch and then another week for something else before release.

Lets hope things can improve soon.

 

As I am reading more and more that Unity 5.x is the worst thing that ever happened and I can see more people who just blindly repeat that, I want to say that Unity 5.3 is one of the best versions I have ever had. I never had this kind of performance and never had as few issues as with this version.
I would like to make it clear that I certainly don't have the same use case as others who actually have problems and I am most likely not targeting the same platforms or devices. Or maybe I just have other settings. No matter what the causes are, I have never had such a flawless experience as with Unity 5.3.

I don't understand why this thread now degenerates more into a "who needs to be blamed for this" topic. This will not help anyone and it will also not improve the situation. It is wasting even more time.

 

they keep saying report bugs, report bugs when majority of the time, you dont even kno where the lag is coming from.

Yes, you are right, we do need to stay positive(although I kinda predicted that releasing unity 5 all features free was a bad idea) maybe QA is not getting paid enough

 

Maybe because Unity should reconsider the things they are doing wrong?

 

I kind of disagree. When there is a problem with something, the first step to solving it is to look where the problem comes from, isn't it? I'm surely no "hater" of some sort, but quite objectively, I can say that I haven't experienced a variety of bugs like these in 4.x.
And if Unity's QA is to blame for obvious bugs making it into the release (which seems to be the case regarding the number of complaints here), then they might want to spend more time on testing before a new release. Again, no negativity intended (especially because I don't work for Unity and I don't even have a clue if Unity QA is responsible for these issues), but obviously something isn't working here.

This is very true. It's hard to decide which version to use right now. There hasn't been a version without any crucial bugs for a while now. It's like a constant cycle of running into new problems, which makes developing hard because you find yourself browsing the forums for a nasty bug the third or fourth time a day. And then you read there's going to be an update solving it. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. At least they react quickly. But as already mentioned by many now, a somewhat more stable environment would be appreciated.

 

I am sure that people in this forum have a tremendously better understanding of how things are working at Unity, how their internal processes are working and what the best strategies are to improve them in the long run and in short.

Unity is actively improving its processes and there is quite some information available. E.g. there are several blog posts about how they measure the performance and what they are improving in the process. As this is testing, they can't cover all cases and they will never be able to do that. However, with valuable feedback from the community, they are able to integrate relevant or critical cases faster.

Testing in general is not trivial for a piece of software like Unity. In fact it is crazy if you think about the number of platforms and configurations they need to test for. It is literally impossible to test everything and issues will always find their way into Unity.

The amount of issues is not tremendously worse in my opinion than in the past. There were more issues than usual with the first versions of Unity 5 and because of that there were certainly a lot of justified complaints here in the forum. What we see at the moment is a lot of noise and people who just join the complaining they have seen in the forum, besides the actual issues.

 

OK. I have a large terrain, one directional light and a motorcycle sim with one reflection probe and get 1 to 5fps in 5.3 What settings are you using that would benefit me and get me over 45fps which i get when backgraded to 5.1.2?

 

ok you need to submit a bug report

 

I am not denying that there are issues!

You know as well as I do that with this description it is very unlikely to get any useful help. There are so many factors that could impact it. It can be some new settings that got wrong like wrong texture format for the lightmap, it could be related to the terrain, it could be stupid things like the console being spammed.
You have the possibility to share your project with Unity or to identify at least the area that is troublesome. No one else has that possibility.

 

Of course, there will always be some sort of bugs. But in the last releases, there have been quite a number of devastating bugs. Those were fixed sooner or later, but in the end, after each new release there were new bugs that also mattered quite a lot. So basically from my perspective as a user of this software, those bugfixes are pretty much just replacing one evil with another. Maybe I'm just unlucky running into the bigger problems while others, like you, won't have to deal with those bugs. And I'm not complaining about this! It's good to hear not everyone runs into crucial issues all the time.
Also, while testing may not be trivial, is anything really trivial in today's world? Still, some people's lives depend on airplane's engines not exploding or whatever. There are many people working on airplanes to prevent planes from crashing. In the same fashion there are people working on the Unity engine. Just because testing isn't trivial, doesn't mean it's less important. On the contrary, this means there should be some focus on it. I know, Unity supports many platforms. You know? It supports many platforms. With that said, I expect it to run on the platforms it supports. So of course, all the platforms should be tested, shouldn't they? (rhetorical question, I don't really want to take this much further, because that would be a whole new topic)

 

Since implementing new features seem to introduce new bugs every time, perhaps Unity need to calm down and release a version solely focused on solving current bugs before picking up new features again. I think this is what UE did with their 4.10 release, basically.

 

@Shushustorm, sorry, not interested in a discussion like that at all, since you are turning too many things I wrote upside down.

@SunnySunshine, Unity has quite a few individual teams and if you e.g. have a look at the UI team, that's exactly what they were doing. They haven't released major new features in quite some time, but dedicated their focus on stabilizing it. The same happens e.g. with PhysX, they seem to heavily focus on stabilization. If you have a look at il2cpp, they are also strongly focusing on that.
Of course, Unity could internally pick some releases where no new features are added and only bug fixes are allowed to take place. To a certain degree, this is already happening. E.g. 5.3.0 contains new features, while the following 5.3.x releases are only for bug fixes. If you are looking for the most stable release, you may wait for the last 5.3.x release.

 

The bug fighting put me so far behind I cannot find the time to log a project and strip it. Just reimporting to a 5.2 to 5.3 and back to 5.1 cost me over 12 hours x 35 bucks an hour. I started this with a 35 an hour estimation of a fixed price contract and was actually ahead of the ballgame at one point making about 60 an hour. I am now down to 15 an hour and dropping. Maybe if they contract me for my lost pay to do so i will. I am frankly sick and fed up of messing around wth Unity and want it to just work as advertised. Other than that they have the complaints and it is not from one person and it is devastating to go from multiples of ten or hundreds of fps to single digits. Absolutely unacceptable.

 

Well said, nice summary..

 

Another excellent reply and it seems you know exactly how I feel, lost time and money, this something Unity can never give back to the customers, no matter if they fix the bugs! Im sick of each week like many others waiting for one fix and they been late with patches. Of course have fhe right to express my thoughts and rant out abit..

 

Sure and endure another seven+ hours of unusable computer due to bandwidth hogging of the upload. It ain't my job and if it is where is my contract for substantial consideration??. This is reproducible on their end. There is nothing fancier than what i stated and it does get 45-60 fps in 5.1.2...but don't use the Profiler or it will always act as though you have it on and spit out console spam about samples and error pause the game.

 

This is for sure my last message for some time in this thread, but everyone is certainly open to reply.

There seems to be plenty of people here who upgraded in the middle of the project without an accurate planning for it and with the naive assumption that it is going to just work.
This is just way beyond the reality! There are almost always issues that can not be predicted. If you don't consider that, it is not the fault of anyone else. But I really struggle to see why you guys completely waste your time with that. If you upgrade to give it a try, maybe make changes, rebake what's needed and then you see that it is not working and you just go back, you have indeed wasted your time. If you take a little bit of additional time to find out where the issue in the new version is, you are making an investment. First, you isolated the area which means, the next time you try it or the next time you start with another project like that, you know exactly what to look for, because you have at least a basic understanding. This will safe you time in the long run.
As you now know where the problem is, you can submit a bug report and inform Unity about the issue. This will increase the chance like crazy that the issue is resolve at a certain point. This would even more justify the time you have spent!

Posts in this forum will also not help where some random rambling about the performance is made. It is just useless. The issue may not happen in 95% of the cases but be very bad in the remaining 5%. But those 5% may just happen on platform X with operating system version Y (Y-1 and Y+1 may work) and graphics driver version Z on CPU or GPU produced by ABC. Further its only visible if option D in Unity was set to E and in the scene you have placed object F using settings G.
No one at Unity is ever going to find that and you can continue to ramble about that issue forever, it won't change anything!

Everyone is open to waste time like that, but in my opinion, it is not Unity's fault that you are wasting your time!

 

Please do not carry on replying, it makes me wonder if you work for unity or ultimate fan boy..you fail read and understand the core issues here. You keep speaking as if your part of the Unity team and a bug report make you happy.

let then speak and reply from themselves, can they not defend there own workings alone that they need other people to, very unprofessional!

The issues People faced in Unity 5.3 are not issues related to upgrading midway, you changed the subject to this! You saying we wasting our time, cannot disagree more, it takes me few minutes to make a posting on these forums and takes me week and more waiting for bug fixes and tracking down issues.. So willing to post any time of day.

 

My intention is not to have a flame war, but since you consciously attacked me, I just want to clarify my position, without any intention of making this a personal thing.

I am not doing this for Unity at all. I am realizing that people are having trouble with Unity, just like I do on a regular basis. Our opinion about what can be done about that are obviously very different. As my opinion is close to the one of Unity doesn't mean that I am acting on their behalf.
A part of resolving those issues is to make Unity aware of them and to help them understand what the actual issue is. If they don't understand the issue, they can't resolve it. Understanding in this context means that they can reproduce it. If that is not given, they can't do anything about it. That's my whole point.

When someone makes a backup of a project, downloads and installs a new version of Unity, upgrades the project and does the necessary adjustments, creates a build, tests it on the target devices, reverts all the previous steps and then writes in the forum that the performance got worse in the new version of Unity, that is a perfect example of wasting time.

 

Yes it is. I upgrade because light baking stalls because of buffer overload, upgrade to 5.2 and drop frame rates and upgrade to 5.3 because release notes tell me I may be going to get my framerate back and be able to bake and no go. It dives headfirst into the single digits. It most certainly is Unity's fault. If light baking had worked in 5.1 I would never have upgraded to 5.2 or 5.3 and then back to where i still cannot bake lighting. So take your opinion and stuff it pal.

 

You most certainly did make it personal. Best thing for you to do is get off this thread.

 

Here is another bug. I use foot IK to keep the feet on the bikes footrest. Works great. I then add code to get the bottom of the feet to place them on the ground with raycasts and subtract the foot bottom height from the IK goal height. Something messes up and the feet won't plant. Now the left foot always acts like i left the foot bottom code in even though it has been removed days ago and a few hundred test runs back. Took a while to figure that out but when i realized the foot always rode above the footrest exactly the distance between the IK Goal and the foot bottom it was obvious. Even upgrading two point versions and back did not resolve this. I have never trashed the library before and wonder if that will kill this phantom code.

 

Sorry, took awhile. I just created a bug, the number is 756023.

 

@Dantus > i don't know in what reality you live but to me Version 5 was the worst release in history!
I started using Unity when it was 1.5 and Mac only... so don't know what simple Games or App's you do but as you can read here in the Forum there are more issues with v5 as with all other in the past!
Look @ the last version 5.3.1p1 > particle bug... it happen on all platforms ! simple to reproduce
And we talk here not about a semi professional tool! We all have spend lot's of Money in it and not a few $ ... it's not a share ware for 10 to 100$ we talk here about a professional tool that cost way more than 1000$ if you want Mobile support! So we can expect some things from it... and if things going worse like now everybody has the right to claim about!
M.

 

I cannot fix the bugs. The client is fumed. I have done my part and the code and art is flawless. The deadline is trashed. I will be spending Christmas alone without money. Merry Christmas Ricatello.

 

Just come in to say my point.
To everyone saying to not upgrade in the middle of a project they forgot one simple thing: Unity 4 is End Of Life!
I am about 80% on a project I have been working more than full time for 1 year and half. Unity always phased old version after a long time and when the new one is ready, this time they didn't. Unity 5 is nowhere near Unity4, not even at the level of Unity 4.1.
Now you could say release it with Unity 4, who force you? Well they force me!.
The game is a f2p game with PvP challenges and at one point in the future for sure there will be issue with new Android or IOS version which will require upgrading to Unity 5 to have a fix.
When that will happen, what am I supposed to say to people who played till that day and maybe even spent even money on the game that they now cannot play anymore because new issues prevent them to have an enjoyable experience?
If I had the issue from the beginning they could have simply trashed the game, but an issue while you are enjoying the game and cannot play anymore? BAD very BAD.

Then there are also other thing to consider like Unity phasing out non neon cpu or the change in Physx.
Luckily I am aware of the first, but if I wasn't, if there were even an handful of people with such devices, it would have been a bad situation to handle.
The change in Physx is also non trivial, as it seem very different and could be hard to match the previous behavior and people could be disoriented by the change in gameplay. Again not a good thing to do.
So now I am in a position where I am forced to switch. But switch to what?!
From what I read Unity5.1 seem the best candidate, but it doesn't make sense to upgrade to an old version when there is already a new version which seem not to be 100% compatible with the old one.
So here I am, still working on Unity4 hoping that within a month I can start migrating to Unity5.

 

This is a really valuable discussion, but could it be split off from this thread into something in general discussion please.

P.s. Please don't attack other users that express a different opinion than yours.

 

Sorry, Why do you wish for it to be split of to general discussion, so we all can have a free for all moan, whole point of us expressing our concerns and experiances is for Unity to see and understand. I wish for Unity team read our posts and reply... If only some of the Unity mangement can also see

Please stop trying to hide some of the negative feedback in old and general threads. Maybe if Unity team replied properly to some concerns then there would be 80 percent less of these comments.

So Unity start explaining yourselves!

 

Part of my job is to show higher ups users' concerns and problems, this is a discussion that I want more people to take part in to highlight it, being buried in a support forum thread doesn't do that. So again, for the benefit of helping me raise this issue further and so we can keep this thread about reporting the technical issues, keep the discussions in general discussion.

 

Your comments are surely not adding any value to the thread. Stop trolling here. We appreaciate our time and need solutions rather than do Unity's QA job.

On topic: Android builds have abolutely horrible FPS issues since 5.3. Profiler shows the problems tied up with transparent geometry rendering.

 

Hi! The problem of Unity's recent lack of reliability has also been heavily discussed during the 5.3 beta :
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/please-unity-slow-down.361090/

The QA team is aware of the problem and we should expect improvements in a near future.

I hope that v5.4 will be the "production ready" release that we are all waiting for. Like many others, I'm also stuck with 5.1 which at the moment is the only version where my project can be done.

 

Yes, this thread maybe then needs to be moved into general section and out of the locked forum, thread needs be alive again..

They are aware of the problem!! Oh wow, its been months, this is a standard reply given to shut people up! , we need more specific answers, not good for Unity Aurore giving info but nothing comes back, one way street..qa still silent!!

I appreciate the developers who come into forums and answer specific technical issues, there are a few of these guys and there work appreciated

You want us to wait for 5.4, dude is that some kind of joke, people have games to release and cant wait another few months..

 

I agree....

 

The fact is that Unity is already aware of this and, maybe I'm naive, but I believe them when they says that improvements are on the way.
This problem obviously can't be solved in a matter of hours and ranting endlessly about it won't make things go faster.
I already see that the 5.4 beta forum is live, so I guess it won't be long before we see if the QA team will hold it's promises.

 

I'm not ranting, i simply asking for information and explanation why proper QA testing is not being done on major releases. See the postings above. Each time there is silence and no explanations then people carry on repeating and raising same issues.

I dont know what the promise is? Maybe i missed something. 5.4 forums is there to discuss new features and problems in the betas. They of course need people test these new features. Thing is since 5x the problematic things and bugs are not really related to new features.

Let me repeat the core issue here: performance or each release for mobile in particular is poor. Therefore the question, how and if any QA testing been done? If QA tested 5.3 intense before release there would not be need for 5.3.1 emergency release, and even with 5.3.1 release a new issue was created..particle system.

So really they should have delayed the 5.3 release until they where confident it had no major problems. It clear something internally is wrong