Unity Universal Render Pipeline causing massive slow down on 2d Mobile Project

Hi,

I hope you are all well.

I have been building a 2D game in Unity and it was going great. I was building it on my Pixel 4XL phone and getting frame rates of about 60fps. However, since updating to Unity .3, and introducing Universal Render Pipeline, the frame rate has dropped right down to about 10 fps. I am quite new to Unity - this is my first game - is there some obvious setting that is supposed to be off / on for 2D mobile games when using Universal Pipeline?

I have stripped the scene right back to have only 3 sprites on scene with some colliders and basic scripts and I am still having the same issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

Hi,

Thanks for the replies.

I am using the 2D renderer.

I am using Unity version "2019.3.0f3 Personal" and URP version "7.1.6".

 

Hi,

Sorry for the delay.

I pushed the stripped down game to: https://github.com/tuqire/scaled-back-unity

The scene is made up of 3 sprites and the player animation. I've removed all the excess prefabs and sprites. I left some basic scripts in there, but I can also remove them if needed.

The render pipeline stuff is in "Assets/Render Pipeline".

 

Is there any update on this?

I have the same problem... It's just a scene with a background, a player (2D sprite) and some 2d lights using URP and I'm getting massive low fps on a Moto G5 (3 fps) and even on Mi A2 it's mostly unplayable!

Is this expected? @tuqire Did you managed to improve the overall performance?

 

@wagenheimer Unfortunately not, my game is currently in early development so I'm just working on other parts of the game. I've noticed reducing the 2D lights count to a single global light seems to improve performance for the time being.

 

Same issue here

 

Hi @yuanxing_cai , just wondering if there is an update to this? Have you checked the repo and reproduced the issue? any ideas if the issue is related to Unity or my own code / setup?

thanks in advance.

 

Hi @yuanxing_cai, I have my scene working fine now with 4 layers and it is working great. Thank you so much!

What do you think is a max number for mobile? Just to make sure I don't go over it.

 

Hello there !

I also went from the regular render pipeline to the URP (2D renderer, not forward).
What I would like to do is apply Bloom only to certain sprites of my main scene. I found this tutorial that describes it pretty well :

However, using Bloom from a Global Volume seems pretty bad for perfs.



This is strange as I used before the Bloom from the Post Processing Stack v2, and didn't have these fps impacts ... Issue is that with this method I had to apply the Bloom to the whole screen, couldn't find a way to apply it only to specific sprites.

Also I took good notes from the sorting layer advice.
Reduced it from 6 to just one.

Is it known that the Bloom effect from the URP is affecting performances a lot @yuanxing_cai ?
Maybe it's because the Bloom from PPStackv2 has a "Fast Mode" ? Would it be possible to have the same on URP ?

Using Unity 2019.3.7f1 / URP 7.3.1

(Note : updating the URP version already improved quite a bit the performance, but it's still affecting it ...)

 

Just wanted to chime in and say that I'm seeing 25 fps average using URP and getting 45 fps using standard built in pipeline on the Nintendo Switch...... Add me as another frustrated developer that heard the call that URP was going to be higher performance and yet it's almost running 50% slower

I currently have 6 sorting layers, so I might try to trim that down and see if it helps performance, but it seems ridiculous that I see such a major performance drop simply switching to URP with no modifications.

I'm running 2019.3.5f1, URP 7.1.8, with the 2D Renderer.

 

same problem here, unity 2019.3.6 , latest versions of URP and sorting layers are 3 ,using 2d renderer. performance on android is terrible

 

now I've just lowered the number of layers to 1 , and the problem still exists.I have another scene with no materials (Just UI elements) and it works like a charm.but this one is with lit materials and of course with some lights,and the performance is so bad

 

ok,now changed all the materials to unlit and turned off all the lights.the frame rate is good but I need lights and shadows,so I'm going to experiment a little more to see the problem is with materials or lights

 

after some experiments I found out that the problem is with 2d lights and not the materials.no matter what settings and how many lights you use, they are very slow for mobiles

 

On my side I have perfs degradation even with no light in the scene

 

So according to what you guys reported, current version of 2d light of URP is no good for mobile? I wish Unity could make it more transparent on this performance issue so devs like us can save time instead of scratching our heads thinking we did s.t wrong. T~T
Still love the 2d light of Unity, wish it could be complete in near future.

 

Im having serious performance loss with URP as well. I set up a basic toggle system to switch between 2 states:

State 1) Universal Render Pipeline (URP), all renderer (non-UI) materials in scene use a shared material - SimpleLit Shader. Quality = default, no shadows
State 2) Standard Render Pipeline, all renderer (non-UI) materials in scene use a shared material - MobileBumpDiffuse Shader. Quality = default, no shadows

Result: URP is about 50% slower (or worse) on both test devices - Galaxy S3, Galaxy S5

 

LWRP with post processing is x2 performance compared to URP, so maybe i will drop unity light2d. Why don't we have the independent 2D light package?

 

I also have problems with performance when I have at least 1 light on. I made a very simple test and I can share the files if you want it.

Setup: Latest Unity today (2020.2.0a15.1993), URP 8.1.0 released on April 24th (that means no public release since your comment yet [9.0 is still private it seems]). I am working with 2019 Unity, but I wanted to get the latest available features to ensure that I am not missing anything.

Target device: Samsung Galaxy S6 which is currently very sensitive to any performance changes. It's not afraid to get hot.

Sanity test: fps counter UI (just one TextMeshProUI and one Update() function). Application framerate set to 60. In Graphics URP assets assigned with default 2D renderer data in it. PostProcessing and shadow booleans are disabled in the main camera (turns out those two flags destroy performance in my project even when no postprocessing or shadow casting presented).
After 10 mins: regular temperature, stable ~60fps.

Test0: add sprite with Sprite-Lit-Default shader and texture in it. Covers ~30% of the screen. Image size (626x571). Without any lights, it's just a black image in the center of the screen.
After 10 mins: regular temperature, stable ~60fps.

Test1: add global 2d light. There is only one sorting layer - default. Now sprite is lit.
Before 5 mins: appears to be regular temperature, stable ~60fps
After 5 mins up to 10 mins: slightly warmer (noticeable, but barely), stable ~50fps, doesn't go higher, ever.

Tested 3 times.
Achieving 30fps in the final product on such low-end device would be okay to me but in my experience every frame matters. Losing 10fps in the naked scene because of single global light and one sprite seems a little extreme.

Test2: add point 2d light circling around the sprite. Global and point lights get blended.
Before 2 mins: appears to be regular temperature, stable ~60fps
After 2 mins up to 10 mins: slightly warmer (noticeable, but barely), 45-47fps.

Test3: same as test2, but default blending texture scale set to 0.01. The quality is unusable, this is done purely for testing.
Before 2 mins: appears to be regular temperature, stable ~60fps
After 2 mins up to 10 mins: noticeably warmer, 55-56fps.

I expected the phone to get really hot before the fps drop, but it got warmer just slightly in most cases. When I was testing the screen fill rate, the phone was getting extremely hot.
I am waiting for 9.0 URP release to try it out, but until then, can you comment on this? What optimizations could be currently made? Is URP 9.0 expected to provide better performance for global 2d light or blending? Is Sprite-Lit-Default the right choice for mobile platforms?

 

I'm working with Unity 2019.4.11f1, "Universal Render Pipeline" with "Lightweight RP" (package version 7.5.1).
I defined a "2D Renderer Data" to work with 2D Lights.
In my game I have four 2D lights:
- Two "Point" 2DLights (each point light has 3 target sorting layers)
- Two "Global" 2DLights. One of them with 3 target sorting layers (lights up my whole game except characters) and the other with 1 sorting layer (Illuminates only my characters).

I'm developing a 2D mobile game for kids and using 2D lights to decorate.
Only ONE "Point" 2DLight is turned on at the same time.
The "Global" light, which illuminates my characters, is always turned on.
The "Global" light, which illuminates my whole game (except characters), is ON only when the point light is OFF.

At certain times in my game, I turn on/off "Point" lights and "Global" light with the above restriction already described.

Everything works great until I use shadows on my characters.
When I use shadows, the frame rate is dropped right down to about 10 fps otherwise it's about 27.

My 2D game is pretty simple. My characters are round sprites (like a coin), so shadows are ridiculously simple.
To gain in performance, I set "Renderer Texture Scale" to 0.4 (insted of default value 1) in the object 2D Renderer Data.
While the performance has greatly improved after that, it is still low.

Each character (above 10 on screen, moving around) has a "Shadow Caster 2D (Experimental)" component and checkbox "Cast shadows" selected.

What else can I do to improve performance? I've done a lot of research and can't figure out what else I can do.

 

The script 2dCastShadow code is written temporarily and generates a lot of garbage, currently the only way is you have to get that code from the package and improve it.

 

Big up to this thread. A few 2D lights and the performance takes a HUGE hit. A few 2D lights with a few sorting layers and the performance becomes completely unbearable.

 

I've got the same problem here, it's not about how many sorting layers and draw calls or 2D lights, the performance is simply horrible on PCs and Macs with onboard graphics cards.
Unity doesn't seem to respond to this problem anymore....

 

My performance problem is only limited to the SRP batcher not batching for my custom shaders when running on GLES3, even on the latest package.
The same exact shaders have the batcher working on Metal for iPhones and when built for Vulkan on Android. The problem is Android phones suffer a GPU computation performance hit of about 0.2ms when running on Vulkan. Switching to GLES3 saw an improvement in the computation but now suffers from SRP batcher not batching.

 

Good news! Going to give this a try today. Does this also apply to desktop or did you mostly focus on mobile (feel like I read that before). Also any timeframe/ideas when this will leave Alpha, typically?

 

Tried it today & I'm seeing BIG improvements. All my scenes are running smoothly now - on my Mac mini 2020 and MacBook Pro 2017. I'm very happy to see this and now I can continue with my project - thanks so much!

One note, though. I was going to compare performance on my MacBook Pro 2010 - but I can't open the builds due to several error messages that all start with: ERROR: Shader Hidden/Universal Render Pipeline/Blit shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)

The bold part is what changes. Basically a lot of shaders are not supported. Does this just mean that these shaders won't run on older models? The MacOS is High Sierra.

 

Are you on Metal or OpenGLCore?
Some shaders might not be OpenGLCore compatible on Mac as Apple GPU discontinued support for OpenGL since OpenGL 4.1.

 

Hey! I'm using Metal actually. Unity crashes the entire macOS if you try to play with OpenGL in editor

 

Most likely the shaders will not run on older Mac models that do not have Metal support. URP shaders require use of features that is available in Metal and OpenGl 4.3 onwards.

 

Sure thing! I'll just paste the whole thing - the more you know the better, eh?

Intel HD Graphics:
Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Dynamic, Max): 288 MB
Vendor: Intel
Device ID: 0x0046
Revision ID: 0x0012
Automatic Graphics Switching: Supported
gMux Version: 1.9.21
Displays:

Color LCD:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1440 x 900 (Widescreen eXtended Graphics Array Plus)
UI Looks like: 1440 x 900
Framebuffer Depth: 24-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported
Automatically Adjust Brightness: No

Video Card: GeForce GT 330M* VRAM Type: GDDR3
Details: *This system has dual graphics processors -- a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256 MB of dedicated GDDR3 SDRAM and Intel HD Graphics with 256 MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory. The system automatically switches between graphics systems based on use (when applications use OpenGL, Core Graphics or other graphically demanding technologies, the system will use the dedicated graphics card, otherwise it will use Intel HD Graphics to conserve battery life).

 

From what I read of the official specs, the GT330M only supports up to OpenGL 3.3 / DX10.1.
It is below the expected target of the Shader.

 

Been wondering, if I have say 5 sorting layers and all of my 2d lights uses the one target sorting layer, is there overhead for having more than 1 sorting layers?

Or is it dependent on the number of different target sorting layers that lights uses per frame?

 

Could you tell me What the difference between 2D Renderer or the Forward Renderer is?
Would you recommend using 2D Renderer for a 2d Project? Is it better performance in that case?
Im having performance issues too and I just realized im using Forward Renderer...
I managed to fix some performance by changin RenderScale to 0.2 - no idea what it means but it helped :S

 

RenderScale is just scaling the resolution of rendertextures used when rendering.
So if your default device resolution is 1024x768 => your rendering rendertextures would be about 205x153.

I am not totally sure what is the difference between the 2D Renderer and the Forward Renderer without inspecting the source. According to my memory(since the last time I made my own custom renderer for my previous project while referencing both renderers), the lighting passes used are different as 2D is mostly simplified to using light mappings while Forward still sends in the light data when rendering hence, the difference in memory bandwidth used per-vertex. And I believe some passes are omitted from the 2D Renderer since most sprites would expect back-to-front rendering as alpha-blending is needed, so the "default" opaque pass is omitted too.