Drawing A LOT of labels on screen

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

I’m having an issue with drawing a large number of labels on the screen (with the legacy GUI).
I have about 10000 points in world space, each one having a label drawn only on repaint event:

foreach (var point in points)
{
 var screenPos = Camera.main.WorldToScreenPoint(point.Position);
 GUI.Label(new Rect(screenPos.x, Screen.height - screenPos.y, 100, 20), point.Text, LabelStyle);
}

It slows down entire application significantly. And I can have much more than 10000 points on the screen, which is even worse.
Is there a way to optimize it or do it other way around?

2

Don’t use the legacy GUI. It is much slower than the new one.

3

But in the new one I need to create/destroy every label when I need to use it? My label amount can vary a lot and change dynamically.

4

Aside from the technical issue, I just wanted to chime in and ask: Do you really need to display 10000 labels at the same time? Does it make sense? I’m not trying to stomp your design or anything, but perhaps you should take a step back and have a second thought.

5

You can just change it if you need to change it. Create a refrence to it and change the .text component. Destroying a lot of objects is not a good idea. You should look into pooling.

6

Yes, in some kind of applications (FE calculations, engineering, CAD, etc.) it makes sense to show 10000 labels at the same time - at least it is something that users expect (and they can still read something out of it).
At this is our case.

Initializing a large number of labels, pooling and reusing them is one way - but it still takes ages to create such number of objects. Tried it already :slight_smile: I was also trying with GUIText and the result is the same.
I know that legacy GUI is not the best, but it seems it’s the best I can get so far (the fastest and without initialization of large number of objects).