Book Image

Unity 2017 Game Optimization - Second Edition

By : Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity 2017 Game Optimization - Second Edition

By: Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Unity is an awesome game development engine. Through its massive feature-set and ease-of-use, Unity helps put some of the best processing and rendering technology in the hands of hobbyists and professionals alike. This book shows you how to make your games fly with the recent version of Unity 2017, and demonstrates that high performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Since nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience, the book starts by explaining how to use the Unity Profiler to detect problems. You will learn how to use stopwatches, timers and logging methods to diagnose the problem. You will then explore techniques to improve performance through better programming practices. Moving on, you will then learn about Unity’s built-in batching processes; when they can be used to improve performance, and their limitations. Next, you will import your art assets using minimal space, CPU and memory at runtime, and discover some underused features and approaches for managing asset data. You will also improve graphics, particle system and shader performance with a series of tips and tricks to make the most of GPU parallel processing. You will then delve into the fundamental layers of the Unity3D engine to discuss some issues that may be difficult to understand without a strong knowledge of its inner-workings. The book also introduces you to the critical performance problems for VR projects and how to tackle them. By the end of the book, you will have learned to improve the development workflow by properly organizing assets and ways to instantiate assets as quickly and waste-free as possible via object pooling.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Software and Hardware List
Preface

Performance enhancements


That's enough talk about the industry and XR development. Let's cover some performance enhancements that can be applied to XR projects.

The kitchen sink

Since AR and VR apps are built using the same Engine, the same subsystems, assets, tools, and utilities as any other Unity game, literally every other performance enhancement mentioned in this book can help VR and AR apps in some fashion, and we should try them all before getting too in-depth with XR-specific enhancements. This is reassuring, as there are a lot of potential performance enhancements we could apply. The downside is that we may need to apply many of them to reach the level of performance we need for our app.

The biggest threat to a VR app's performance is GPU Fill Rate, which is already one of the more likely bottlenecks in any other game, but significantly more so for VR since we will always be trying to render a high resolution image to a much larger Frame Buffer (since we're effectively rendering the...