Unity Application Priority Problems

Hello! I develop a tool more so than a game. A lot of the time the tool is minimized, and if the user is playing a AAA game in full-screen mode, it seems to cause my unity application to turn sluggish. Performance is extremely important in this case because it's used by live streaming broadcasters.

I'm looking for tips or advice to solve this issue.

My Application info:
-86x build
-version 2019.4.1f1
-windowed mode
-Runs in background property checked

 

What is it doing while it's minimized?

 

rendering characters walking back and forth pretty much. nothing special.

 

If it's minimized, wouldn't anything it's rendering not be visible anyway?

 

it's being rendered for a live stream overlay, so, the user doesn't see it, but viewers do.

 

While I've not encountered it myself, I've also had several users of my application, which is used to render a single 3D character and overlay it on a stream in a similar manner, complain about this. At first I assumed it was just them having an older GPU, but it also occured for people using an RTX 2080. I'm still looking for a reliable solution.

Things that reportedly helped in some very few cases were:

• Turning hardware accelerated GPU scheduling on or off in the Windows graphics settings
• Setting nvidia drivers to max performance and turning texture filtering quality to high performance

Things that seem to make no difference at all:

• Setting process priority in Windows

Other things I've found, but haven't heard results from so far:

• Apparently Windows game mode can cause these issues when enabled, but nobody I asked so far had it enabled
• I haven't tried it, but maybe the IDXGIDevice::SetGPUThreadPriority API could help, although I'm not hopeful

Any other leads on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

Unity version: 2019.4.16f1

 

Thanks for posting some of your findings . I'm also still looking for any leads on fixing this problem.