Draw Calls Graphics Emulation

[VIC201]

When i set Graphics Emulation from “No Emulation” to “Dinosaur” the number of draw calls increases dramatically. (In this case from 16 to 41)

I am preparing for the iPhone Basic and I want to do as much none-iPhon-specific stuff as possible before I start with the trial. I’m trying to keep things as simple as possible because I fear the bad performance of the iPhone.

Will the draw calls on the iPhone usually be much higher than with “No Emulation”?

[anon_31663026]

Why don’t use the iPhone Graphics Emulation instead of Dinosaur??

EDIT: Oups didn’t see that you didn’t have Unity iPhone. Sorry. But no, on iPhone you shouldn’t see such a big increase of drawcalls (make sure you aren’t using Dynamic Lighting)

[VIC201]

Because i didn’t started with the iphone basic trial yet

[Dreamora]

The raised drawcalls comes from the fact that the iphone only supports 2 textures at the same time and does not support any pixel or vertex shaders.

For that reason all those things need to be replicated through multiple passes (on the iphone that means dublicate geometry that handle the additional effects) and alike, which is very costly.

[VIC201]

GUI seems to increase draw calls a lot too. Any tricks available?

[Dreamora]

Using the sprite manager and write your own single drawcall gui system

[VIC201]

Does that mean “bye bye” Unity-GUI at all?

Is there some shared code available for that?

[anon_4839760]

For the most part I think it is recommended to keep UnityGUI limited to front end menus, options screens, and other places where you don’t expect to be also rendering 3D at 30fps…

SpriteManager shared code (user submitted, thanks to Brady) can be found in this thread

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=17864

and on the wiki here

unifycommunity.com - unifycommunity Resources and Information.

my recommendation for using the spritemanager with a 2nd camera to do your GUI can be found in this thread

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=131706#131706

quoted here:

Make a 2nd camera off to the side somewhere, set it to orthographic, clear depth-only, and set it’s layer culling to only render UI (set your main camera to never render UI). Have the 2nd camera point at a bunch of sprites set to UI layer using the SpriteManager class posted in this forum. Assuming you don’t incur any bad overhead from setting up the 2nd camera (worst part is probably the z-clear?), you should be then able to do all your UI with 1 draw call (assuming you have all your elements on 1 texture-atlas and then animate them using the SpriteManager). That should be pretty quick, I’d imagine, and has the added benefit (for me) that the main camera’s FOV can change and your UI stays locked on screen. Hope that makes sense.

-jdm