Android game runs better on development build than on a normal build.

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I’m creating a game mostly based on 2D physics for android and i’m having a strange issue.

I’m testing my game on a galaxy a5, so I was kind of expecting slow performance. When I loaded the game onto my device it didn’t run quite as smooth as I hoped it would, so naturally I made a development build to see what the profiler was saying. To my surprise the game all of a sudden started to run perfectly. No stutters, fps around 100. Afterwards I made another normal build and yet again, lag. To make things even worse, the development build only runs smoothly when I’m actively using the profiler. If I unplug my device and run the developer build, it runs poorly again. Has anyone ever had a similar experience? I found this but It was from a while back and there wasn’t really a solution.

My thought are that my project settings aren’t optimal. I’m fairly new to unity development so I’m not really sure what to change. Does anyone know why I see such a big difference in performance when switching to development build?

Also midway through this project I started using the 2D renderer with the lwrp. just recently I switched back to the default because the visuals weren’t worth the performance drop for my game. Maybe switching back and forth between render modes messed something up in my project?

I would just like to see what you guys think about my situation.

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having similar problem as well. difference between android mobile release build and development build is significant. development build show almost consistent 60fps while release build fluctuates from 60 to 30 fps almost.

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1 Answer

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Did you ever find a solution to this issue? I’m seeing the same issue with my webGL build from Unity 2021.3.6f1.
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Running without the profiler attached I see what looks like stuttering or frame drops where the game will freeze for a split second then continue.
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Running with the profiler attached and the game runs super smooth. I also do not see the stuttering when running the game on an iphone 13 in mobile safari (yes, I know unity says mobile safari is not officially supported, but the game runs smoother there then on desktop chrome/firefox where I have a GTX 1060).
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UPDATE:
Turns out this was happening because chrome and firefox were using my CPU’s onboard graphics instead of my GTX 1060. Once I forced chrome to use the dedicated GPU using these instructions the stuttering stopped. It’s still strange that even when using the onboard graphics, the game was able to run super smooth only when the profiler was attached. I still think there is an issue where running with the profiler gives better performance for some reason…