Very poor performance on Android after upgrading to Unity 5

The standard shader is considerably slower than the old Unity shaders. Of course they will reject this kind of report, because it is not even close to a regression from Unity 4 to 5.

 

But what are us mobile developers to use? I used to use the mobile shaders but the don't seem to exist in unity 5 anymore. Unity seems to have shifted to being anti mobile.

 

15fps on 5.3.0f4 with my Xperia Android M4. 60 fps on my "old" iphone 5, which is 2 years older than my xperia android m4

switched immediately to 5.2.1 and it went to 60fps on my Xperia M4 Android.

 

There are still the legacy shaders which are a lot faster than the standard shader. If the legacy shaders are not fast enough, there is still the possibility to download the mobile shaders.

 

Yeah, that is true to some degree, but in my report i did not complain about the shader being slow.
I even mentioned in that report that using mobile shaders brings a few fps but still shows abysmal performance (never going above 40fps on my devices).
Later i even recreated my example scene in 4.x and reached easy solid 60fps.

It kinda bugs me that they seemingly don't show interest in solving this issue. Let alone acknowledging it as a real issue.

 

If you create a project that easily reaches 60 fps in Unity 4.x and this exact same project is a lot slower in Unity 5.x, without e.g. switching to use the standard shader, this is a regression. If you submit such a report and you make it possible to vote for it, I am sure you are going to get a huge amount of votes which would signal the importance to Unity.

But it is absolutely essential that you don't start to actively change things, like using the standard shader or other things that are known to be more expensive. Also, there seem to be performance issues in 5.3 with OpenGL 4.x core. If you avoid those, you should have a solid bug report.

 

Well, i could create an empty 4.x project with unity's utility fps counter only, add device screenshots and profiler of good fps. Then upgrade these empty scenes to 5.3 and probably show low fps add screnshots.
though i wonder if it's necessary to send them two empty projects.
Might as well do it, since it really bothers me.

Edit:
Okay, preparing this i noticed at least empty scenes give me 60fps now in 4.6 and 5.3 upgraded and new projects. Except when using profiler in 5.3 but that's probably because of the new frame debugging feature and is to expected. Then it drops me down to 50fps on my weaker device in a scene with only the Framecounter prefab from unity.

Adding a cube even with standard shader and a directional light to the scene still keeps me at 60fps in the newly created 5.3 project that now contains new ui - framecounter, standard shader on 3d (cube) model, and a realtime directional light.
Now i'm kinda puzzled about what it actually is that is causing lower framerates in projects that got some more content and ran fine in 4.x.

Edit2:
Added plane, 2nd cube, physics, still 60fps on weak device, but the plane looks strange with standard shader (but only on the device, in editor it's fine).
http://i.imgur.com/6B4sVlv.png

Edit3:
Even getting Input.MouseDown(0) in Update and updating a UI textfield every frame isn't dropping my framerate.

Edit4:
Changed to Input.MouseDown(1), added UI button and an EventSystem.
touching the screen now makes the fps jump between 58 and 60.
Pressing the UI button for the first time makes it jump to ~40fps, but only for one short hit and then goes back up.
other than that it stays at 60.
But still not down to constant ~40 what i'm getting at best in very simple projects. hmm..

 

That's not how you isolate the issue. You are doing it backward.
Start with the faulty project and start removing things from the scene until the issue disappear.
When it disappear it mean you just removed the thing causing the slow down.

 

Well, since i had it in pretty much every project that uses unity 5.x since 5.0, even after upgrading from 4.x and didn't want to remove hundrets of assets from an existing project one by one i started adding the basic things that pretty much every project lives of to try and pinpoint a system that may cause problems when it's used.
So i added the major systems one by one and was hoping for one of them to start causing framerate issues:
empty scene running on it's own? - a while ago even that caused fps problems on android for me if i remember correctly but that seems fixed to some degree now.
is it UI?
is it 3d model rendering / shader?
is it physics?
is it lighting?
is it input?
But for now in very limited ways all those didn't cause issues, even combined.
Only the very first input for a UI Event System on a Button or something caused a lagspike, but nothing constant.

I also tried switching off things in another project one by one to some degree.
disableing directional light
quality settings switching
shader switching
removing a single particle system from the scene
think i even tried disableing the ui.
all that remained were character controller, camera, two not very complex 3d models and a few 3d cubes, one rigidbody.
I do not get over 40fps with that. Yet it's not really much more than what i had in my building up setup.

And like in earlier profiler screens i got slowed down by Rendering Clear and Device.Present. Nothing else really.

Back in a 4.x project i got 35 fps when i jokingly added the water prefab with full reflection and refraction to a project to see what happens, and 60fps on full regular scenes. Today i have this when i have a few cubes on screen, or a breath of nothing (that's a very early unfancy proto btw.). After upgrading this 2d project from 5.2 to 5.3 it even started crashing on me after a few seconds of runtime.

I just can't see where it's really coming from right now. But i can see it's there, somewhere...

What is it that let's this run at 58-60fps
But this only at 35?

Edit:
Et voilà, i moved that submarine thing to 4.6 and guess what, no crash, solid 60fps.
I'm not sure if it's connected to the main performance issue we're seeing in 5.x but i guess i'll send those two projects in.
(Screens captured with android device monitor from the device itself that's why there's tearing)

 

You seem to have two good reproductions here. What prevents you from submitting those as bug reports and to place the case number here?

 

Just cleaned up the folders, zipped them, wrote a report and sent it in.
Though i'm not sure if the issue in this particular project is caused by the one that generally causes the performance issues from 4.x to 5.x, but we'll see what they may find in it. In the end this is a project that runs horrible and crashes on two devices after upgrading the project while it's on solid 60fps in 4.6.

And just got the mail: Case753693

 

2 fps on Android 5.0.1, 5.1.1 (Huawei 6y, Nexus 7) and 40 fps on GNET (chinese fake) phone with 40 VRAM/1CPU/1GZ and without RAM but on Android 4.0.3.
WTF?

 

Welcome to the forum!

 

We are having exactly same problem. Simple 2D game.. single difit FPS on new mobile phones (samsung Galaxy S4 and some other) with android 5, on 6 years old Mobile phone with older Android, games works liek a charm above 30FPS. This is really huge issue for us right now and I am not sure if there is any way around it. We tried a lot, but nothing seems to be fixing the issue

EDIT: One thing I didn't tried before was switching API to ES2. And yes, this fixed whole issue. Game back to stable high FPS on new devices.

 

Weird - I can't set Vsync in the Quality tab - it's stuck on OFF and reverts as soon as I select otherwise?
If I add a line: QualitySettings.vSyncCount = 1; the game exits immediately on the device

 

I just noticed something very interesting.
Even though i only get constant 50FPS on my xperia play in a scene with just UI menus, the Android Device Monitor shows me that my phone isn't utilizing all available CPU power even though it's temperature isn't warm or anything and i just started the game from an idleing phone.

50FPS and more than half of the cpu is just idleing and doing nothing and the game uses only about 1/4 of the CPU.


Similar results on my Acer Tablet.
It reaches 60 FPS in the menu, but in a game scene it only reaches 30 FPS. Yet the game only utilizes 1/4 of the CPU and still half of the CPU is just idleing:



Edit:
On the other hand i just noticed that games i created with a 4.x version use about the same percentage of the CPU (1/4), some a little more (about half of the CPU), but reach constant 60fps and also have some percentage left for idle (bit more than 1/4 idle in worst case).

 

How to switch to ES 2.0? Is it the "Texture compression" in Build settings, I'm right?

 

I think it's:
Player Settings > Android Platform > Other Settings > Uncheck "Auto Graphics API" and remove OpenGLES3 from that appearing list.

 

Oo, so I will try it, thank you.

 

Sounds like the bottle neck in the system is not the CPU, perhaps it's GPU bound?

 

A thought i had, though i have to admit i'm not all too knowledgeable in (mobile) hardware and i could easily see myself being wrong with this, was that the graphics processor was integrated in those CPUs (kinda like intel integrated graphics in their CPUs), since i don't think those mobile chips allow seperate graphics profiling access and so it would be shown with the CPU performance.
But that would even surprise me more why it's not used to 100% when it's lagging.
So it could very well be seperated and just not shown/accessable and hint at a GPU bottleneck rather than something else.

 

It's more likely down to the shaders being a bit different, only a few devices have shared CPU / GPU, depending on you lighting setting they sample extra stuff in 5. The lack of GPU profiling is a driver thing.

 

After disabling OpenGL ES 3.0 my performance went back from 20 fps to 60 on LG Spirit. But I have a question. How it looks on other devices with other GPU and CPU?

 

All OpenGL ES 3.0 devices support 2.0, so unless you have shaders which specifically require 3.0 it should look the same.

 

anyone know if this is fixed in the 5.3.1 release? thx

 

Not much has changed for me with 5.3.1f1.
Or to put it in other words: I don't notice any difference in my cases.

 

I thought the root of all Android issues where Shaders...
And in 5.3 OpenGL 3 broke..

 

Testers with Android 5/5.1 reports: If I change API from Auto to OpenGLES2 app work a little (liiiiiiiitle) bit better.
Tester with Android 4 said me: CRAZY FAST NOW, MF!!!

WTF?

 

I'm not too sure about that since you can use any shader, like even unlit color, or mobile unlit. Sure it runs a little better but still nowhere near 4.x performance for me.

I also noticed it seems to be in strong connection with either screen fillrate or general distance to rendered objects.
In a current project I'm building levels mostly out of cubes.
I can use the same scene (so same amount of objects/models/vertices, script, physics, etc.) but only change the orthographic cameras size and get more and more fps the smaller the scene gets, or the more already cleared background can be seen in a frame. How many cubes i throw in the scene doesn't really matter.
I can have 0 cubes and get ~32FPS on the closest camera setting i have, or 100+ cubes and it stays about the same.
And as i zoom out i get to 50+ FPS with the same content on screen, just not as close.

That might explain why already my earlier postet submarine proto example ran at horrid fps, because the whole screen had something rendered.

Gonna make a test now just placing a quad in front of a cam and see what the results will be.


E1:
Oh my god, lol, that's it...
here we have a simple plane just in front of a camera:


(it's this scene from my post earlier: http://i.imgur.com/6B4sVlv.png I just disabled the cubes in that scene and put the plane in front of the camera, an there we go, only 40fps now in a scene of nothingness)

E2:
To be fair i also now tested mobile/diffuse shader, disabled unneccessary UI so it's only the fps counter, and disabled a single directional light in the scene.
Now it's fighting to get to 60fps, it keeps jumping between 55 and 60. Which is still bad for the given scene imo
With a single directional light enabled, it's still exactly the same as without. http://i.imgur.com/PmPE6IX.png

 

If it was as simple as that, Unity could have resolved it long ago!

 

I don't know if it has fixed all related cases, but I can see a definite improvement in my (2d) game.
Where fps dropped randomly every couple seconds between 40-50 i can now see a stable 60 again. (Samsung s6)

 

5.3.0f4.
I had 22 fps in 2d game where i used SpriteRenderers. So I change them into Quads with standard shader/Rendering mode = Fade and got stable 50 fps with VSync enabled.
also I tried set that material to SpriteRenderers but it didn't help.
And what now? I must torture myself with adjusting quads?

 

Do a bug report, it gets fixed you don't have to use work arounds...

 

I posted this a while ago here:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/2d...maintain-a-smooth-60-fps.315934/#post-2311889

I have had the same problem, and I have managed to fix my game using the following techniques,

• Make sure everything is a prefab (except any object that doesn't have a renderer), this step is especially important for sprites with alpha and do this even if you only have 1 in your scene
• If using Physics 2D, make sure any changes to rigidbodies are done in FixedUpdate, this is quite standard but is often overlooked.
• If using Physics 2D + rigidbodies, make sure only your main character has Continuous collision, everything else should be discrete.
• Graphics settings V Sync - Every V Blank
• If you are making a simple 2D game, delete all the quality profiles except simple and turn v sync on for this profile
• Before you build your apk go to the Android player settings, Other Settings, untick 'Auto Graphics API' and only add OpenGLES2 do not use 3 or even add it, its performance is terrible. You can also turn on multithreaded rendering if you still can't reach 60fps

These worked for me, I went from Unity 4.6 getting 60fps to Unity 5 and getting under 45fps on the same project, after a week of various tweaks my game now runs smooth; never drops below 60.

 

I have very simple 2D game which suffered a huge fps drop after updating to unity 5.3. However turning off and deleting OpenGLES3 for android platform seemed to fix low fps completely. I highly recommend that everyone who's having performance issues tries this solution.

 

Alrighty then.....Happy Holidays everyone.

 

Thanks. Very helpful clause!

 

Setting "OpenGLES2" (non Auto API) and deleting OpenGLES3 for Android 5 helped.
Better way - wait for update.

 

Is it safe to use Unity 5 for existing projects now or should I continue to wait? I do not want to loose users because of performance issues that did not exist before... But I think I won't be able to stay with Unity 4.x forever because I see more and more support for it dropping

 

Take the leap to 5, it has a steeper learning curve to 4 but once you understand how its performance is handled you will be glad you made the switch. Personally I would stick to 5.1 as 5.2 is full of problems and 5.3 is the same, but these problems will be fixed it just takes time. I've been waiting for the Android splash screen to be updated for months but still no luck.

 

I haven't had any luck in terms of performance with anything i have tried in a 5.x version on my devices.
You can easily try it for yourself, make a seperate installation of Unity 5, backup your project and give it a test go.

 

I figure I'll give my input on this since I managed to make some headway after fiddling with Android performance issues for most of my afternoon.

To give some background, here's my setup:
- Windows 10 Pro x64
- Unity 5.3.1f1 Personal
- Latest Android SDK & NDK (Updated 12/26/15)

Testing device:
- Google Nexus 7 2013
- Android 6.0.1 [Stock]
- All Default Settings

Attached are all the relevant settings with which I managed to achieve perfect 60 Frames/sec with a standard scene for my project. Granted my project makes use of mostly primitive 3D objects and maybe 4 lights max at a time so your results may vary.

Any stock Unity 5 project barely gets 30 Frames/sec in a completely empty scene on my Android tablet. These settings managed to correct that issue and so far I've been able to slowly step up the visuals without dipping below 60. I am using Mobile Shaders as well as the MK Glow System. Hopefully this proves useful to some of you.

The following script was also used:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3.  
4. public class FixMaybe : MonoBehaviour {
5.  
6.     // Use this for initialization
7.     void Start () {
8.         Application.targetFrameRate = 60;
9.         Screen.SetResolution(1200, 1920, true, 60);
10.     }
11.  
12.     // Update is called once per frame
13.     void Update () {
14.  
15.     }

The resolution will vary for your device. I simply had that in there to test at different 16:10 resolutions to see if it made any difference.

 

Thanks for the tips AzureKNight45!

Though, it didn't improve my situation.
I got to testrun my projects on a Nexus 5 and reach 60fps (even before), too, like no problem.
But!
The device gets hot quickly, like my game puts an unnecessary big strain on the device.
And well, still no improvement on older devices that run fine with a 4.x version.

 

Unity 5 definitely still has some performance issues when it comes to mobile. I was able to have a full 3D scene in 4.6 on a Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 at full 1600p without any performance issues. Now I'm barely able to manage an orthographic 2.5D scene with minimal textures and maybe 2 lights. Took me a good 6 hours of troubleshooting to get decent performance on my Nexus 7. I hope they fix this issue soon as I'm hoping to publish within the next 60 days and this could easily stand in the way.

I've been sending test builds to some friends with varying devices and it seems to be hit or miss. Worth noting that most of these devices are running relatively recent chipsets. The settings required for good performance are device specific for now I suppose.

 

Did you manage to send Unity any bug reports, if so was there any reply from Unity QA?

 

Honestly I haven't sent any in at this point. Looks like they've already received a ton of reports for this exact issue. I'll be doing some more testing after work today and I'll collect as much data as I can and send a few. Problem is I'm not getting any errors or odd behavior beyond poor performance. Gfx.WaitForPresent was usually around 70-80% initially but it's still there now that I'm getting decent performance on my Nexus 7.

*I happen to own an iPhone 6+ and a Macbook Pro. I'm going to just do a test on the iPhone to see if this issue is Android specific or mobile in general. I'll report what I can later today.

 

Sorry it took me so long to post my test results. This is by no means a scientific test. The profiler failed to connect during iOS testing and therefore I can't directly compare Android and iOS performance. I also picked up an iPad Mini 2 over the holidays so I'll include that in the results. I used my desktop workstation to compile the Android builds and the MacBook Pro to compile the iOS builds.

Testing Environment:
- Windows 10 Pro x64
- Mac OS X 10.11.2
- Unity 5.3.1f1 Personal
- Xcode 7.2
- Latest Android and iOS SDKs

Targeted Devices:
*Google Nexus 7 2013
- Android 6.0.1
- Snapdragon S4 SOC
- 1920x1200 @ 60

*Apple iPad Mini 2
- iOS 9.2
- Apple A7 SOC
- 2048x1536 @ 60

* iPhone 6 Plus
- iOS 9.2
- Apple A8 SOC
- 1920x1080 @60

The Results:
Android seemed to have the worst overall performance with random stutters and overall high CPU usage. Android also required very specific settings to run properly and any change to said settings would result in a massive performance drop. I understand that the Snapdragon S4 Pro in the Nexus 7 2013 is a bit behind the Apple A7 and A8, however the Nexus 7 suffered these issues even at lower resolutions.

iOS had relatively good performance independent of most project settings and managed to maintain a solid 60 frames/s throughout testing. The only issue I encountered was on the iPhone 6 Plus where a spotlight in my scene seemed to be flickering every other frame. I will be submitting a bug report on that particular issue.

The setting which had the most impact was OpenGL. Forcing OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android yielded the best performance while this setting did not matter on iOS. OpenGL ES 3.0 would quickly bring the framerate down to the low 40s on Android independent of what was in the scene despite the Adreno 320 in the S4 SOC supporting the 3.0 standard. I will also try and submit some sort of report on this issue.

The overall issue with Android seems hard to pin down and may also be device specific. I'm going to just continue development and hope for a patch in the near future.