Just wanted to share a few notes about Amplify Bloom and Unity Post FX Stack on Mobile.
TLDR Below
I have a game coming out at the end of this month and bloom is a very important part of the visual style I was going for.
I initially started with Amplify bloom but I noticed that it only ran well on recent flagship phones. In my case, I tested the Note 7 (non-explodey one) and the S8 initially. After testing on a mid-range tablet, the LG G3 and the Note 4, I realized I needed to scale it back if I was to keep it in.
I tried bringing all the settings to the lowest value on the amplify component but it STILL took up a large part of the render time.
So after messing about, I tried the Unity Post Processing stack and to my amazement, it ran about twice as fast as Amplify did. (Not as pretty mind you, but for mobile, it’s the most I could ask for.) Even if I included Color Grading to help get closer to amplify’s feel it was faster.
TLDR
Unity Post Processing Stack runs about twice as fast as Amplify even with color grading enabled and looks similar enough to use on mobile. I got adequate performance across and I’m able to keep it on with most devices.
I’m currently making the same thing using this presentation and slides
It’s in russian, and I don’t know if you’re able to understand it, but they actually made a working post processing stack with motion blur, bloom, fullscreen lens flares and screen distortion effects that run 30 fps on Galaxy S2.
There’s also a thread regarding this Post Process Mobile Performance : Alternatives To Graphics.Blit , OnRenderImage ?
However, I can’t make a simple fullscreen quad rendering to work. Post Processing with Graphics.DrawMeshNow. Problems with render-to-texture
Once I got it working - it can be turned into a lightning fast mobile bloom. It will be much faster than built-in PostProcessing Stack bloom and won’t depend on screen resolution. So this is definitely a way to go.
To be honest I haven’t even tried before. Amplify gives such good visual results I’ve just used them since the old stack was deprecated.
Thanks for sharing this and I will be looking into this since I really want to get as much speed as possible out of the game to make it accessible.
I’ll post back here the game, and any fx methods that I end up using.
I’ve made a custom fast mobile blur. On Android tablets it’s barely slowing the devices down. Before and after solid 60 FPS where FxPro drops to 25 FPS and Standard Post Processing Stack bloom drops all the way to 15 FPS
Here’s a quick demo.
I will upload it to the assetstore and make it free for a week or two (and then make it paid), so you’ll be able to grab it for free and compare to other choises. Video recorded straight on a device.
2 Likes
This is fantastic and should make my game more accessible. Great looking scene by the way. Please post a link here if you make it free. I will gladly try and send some more devs your way as well if it works/looks as good as that video.
Thanks!
hey, have you already distributed this ? can’t find the link to it
thanks 
