I have been working on the main menu options of my 2D game for PC builds for some time now under a resolution of 720p (1280 x 720), and it had been running very smoothly above 60 fps most of the time. I basically have been working with PNG images as sprites and backgrounds for building a proper aesthetic without the reliance of post-processing or unique shaders.
I have decided, however, to restructure the game into a higher resolution of 1080p to meet today’s more common gaming platform standards. This meant having to enhance the sizes of most of my previous art assets by 150%. Upon applying all these assets into the new build though, the game suddenly has slowed down to an average rate of 40 fps, and no matter how much I try to optimize the game by compressing images and removing pointless methods in the code, the game remains sluggish.
I don’t fully understand why no improvement can be made to the game at a higher resolution. Though, I am certain the general causes are related to the larger texture files upsetting the GPU. For instance, I have a 3840 by 1080 px sprite that resembles a fog that is meant to scroll across the screen in a repetitive loop. I did what I could to compress the size, but no luck. I also resorted to rendering the image as a material for a quad instead to allow its wrap mode to repeat, but it also doesn’t bring much improvement and it doesn’t allow me to filter the alpha properly to my expectations. In addition, I have a lot of large tree sprites set in the background to move along the background when I execute the illusion of moving across the scene. Again, I have compressed them to reduce filesize usage, but no change. It all still works perfectly at 1280 x 720 resolution, so I’m baffled on why the render time would change so drastically from a 50% increase in screen size.
I’m beginning to think the issues are due to my graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 7730M and Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000). It might also be due to my version of Unity being at 2018.2.20f1. Can anyone tell me if these are the possible reasons for my game’s slow performance? Or am I really neglecting a certain technique to further optimize the processing power usage? I swear, I have tried nearly everything I’ve read up upon to make it happen, like Static batching or Occulsion culling. Please let me know of any other solutions.