Book Image

Unity 5 Game Optimization

By : Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity 5 Game Optimization

By: Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Competition within the gaming industry has become significantly fiercer in recent years with the adoption of game development frameworks such as Unity3D. 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 has led to an enormous explosion of talent, which has made it critical to ensure our games stand out from the crowd through a high level of quality. A good user experience is essential to create a solid product that our users will enjoy for many years to come. Nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience. Input latency, slow rendering, broken physics, stutters, freezes, and crashes are among a gamer's worst nightmares and it's up to us as game developers to ensure this never happens. High performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Initially, you will explore the major features of the Unity3D Engine from top to bottom, investigating a multitude of ways we can improve application performance starting with the detection and analysis of bottlenecks. You'll then gain an understanding of possible solutions and how to implement them. You will then learn everything you need to know about where performance bottlenecks can be found, why they happen, and how to work around them. This book gathers a massive wealth of knowledge together in one place, saving many hours of research and can be used as a quick reference to solve specific issues that arise during product development.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unity 5 Game Optimization
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Profiling rendering issues


Poor rendering performance can manifest itself in a number of ways, depending on whether the device is CPU-bound, or GPU-bound; in the latter case, the root cause could originate from a number of places within the graphics pipeline. This can make the investigatory stage rather involved, but once the source of the bottleneck is discovered and the problem is resolved, we can expect significant improvements as small fixes tend to reap big rewards when it comes to the rendering subsystem.

We briefly touched upon the subject of being CPU/GPU-bound in Chapter 3, The Benefits of Batching. To summarize the earlier discussion, we know that the CPU sends rendering instructions through the graphics API, that funnel through the hardware driver to the GPU device, which results in commands entering the GPU's Command Buffer. These commands are processed by the massively parallel GPU system one by one until the buffer is empty. But there are a lot more nuances involved in this...