So, I am somewhat confused. I thought that deferred shading was faster (with many lights ) than Foreward and that only the shadows were making it slow. Well not so much. I turned down the shadow distance all the way and the frame rate was only marginally affected. I have a decent system with an 8800M GTS graphics card, but a simple scene with a mere 1700 triangles slows down to a crawl with 11 light sources. Turning off shadows completely does not make a difference either.
BUT, the moment I switch to Foreward performance goes up, up, up. I am talking 300+ FPS versus 20 FPS here.
That is a huge difference. So, the problem with Deferred shading now is that it does not allow for shadows from anything but Directional lights. I heard that this used to be different in previous versions of Unity.
So now I am somewhat stuck. I dont quite know how to go on. Of course I could try to fake a few things and just use fake shadows for my characters and all that. Does anybody here have some more suggestions?
Maybe the Unity devs can put the shadows back into the Foreward shading (just turn them off for the free version, if you have to?
Please?
I doubt you actually turned the shadows off, or you have something else set up wrong. Here’s a clip from a scene with an absurd number of point lights. (Way more than you see here, about 150 or so. The number is the fps.)
–Eric
I turned off the shadows on the lights. I also tried turning off the shadows in the quality settings. Neither brought any improvement in speed.
I cant help it, but that is what I did. I “only” have 11 lights in the scene. Setting the shadow Distance to 0 also did not change a thing.
Foreward rendering is up to 500 FPS, Deferred is 30 to 50 fps, depending on settings.
What does the Profiler say?
Strange, with the profiler running, it I get very different FPS displayed than without it running.
I get more than 500 FPS without it and only 120 FPS with it (with Foreward lighting that is).
It also says something different in the profiler than what the statistics say.
This is somewhat screwed up.
thats because the profiler eats massive amounts of performance due to the large amount of pixel operations to draw the bars etc
don’t have it open when you want to profile something, just run what you want to test, then click pause and open it to analyze the data.
Ok, thanks draemora. Gotta learn things the slow way, I guess.
Edit: Hmm, but the Profiler does not record anything when the panel is not open 
How do I do that then?
Anyway, xadhoo, what would you like to know from the profiler exactly?
This thing says a whole lot 
In any case. I turned off shadows for all the lights in the Inspector that had no effect. I turned them back on for the lights and then turned the pixel light count and the shadow distance in the Quality settings to 1 and I still only get ~35 fps.
I disable shadows completely in the quality settings and set the shadow distance and pixel light count to 0 (my “fastest” setting) and I still only get about 45 fps.
I switch to the Fantastic quality setting and turn on Foreward and I get 400 to 500 fps.
Interestingly I dont think that the pixel light count does not seem to have any affect in deferred mode in regards to what the rendering looks like. It does make a huge difference in Foreward mode though. So that is also worth notig.