Editor Way Laggy When in Play Mode on New MacBook Pro

Questions & Answers
1

Unity Editor works fine until I enter play mode. Then it becomes incredibly laggy regardless of what is in the scene. In a new scene with no geometry or logic running it is still laggy.

Why would this be the case? My thoughts are that it’s either Unity is having issues with an Intel Iris Graphics card or that the card is the issue.

Unity works fine outside of play mode. Not sure what to make of it. How does Unity use the card different when in play mode? What could be the issue?

I’ve searched and only been able to find an answer for pc, where they say to force unity to use open gl. My understanding is that Mac only uses open gl. so doesn’t seem to fit. Am I wrong there?

I’m running:

macOS Sierra
3.3 GHz Intel Core i7
Intel Iris Graphics 550 1536 MB.

I have build settings on on Mac OS X _x86_64

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

2

Weird. I went to Quality Settings, toggled off Anti Aliasing and it suddenly worked with no lag. I toggled Anti Aliasing back on and lag did not return. Very weird. I’ve dealt with the lag for two days and now it is gone suddenly. While the issue is resolved for me for now it still begs the question what is going on?

4

Old thread, but I was having the same issue with Unity 2020.3.19f1 on a 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M. Sharing the fix that worked for me in case anyone discovers this thread via search:

  • Exit play mode.
  • Visit Unity → Preferences. Change Interaction Mode from Default to Custom, but note the value next to Monitor Refresh Rate in the drop-down (in my case 16 ms).
  • Set the Frame Throttling (milliseconds) to a number lower than your monitor refresh rate. 12 worked well for me. If you go too low or too high you may see stuttering again.
    –
    I wrote it up in more detail here with before/after video if anyone needs more info or screenshots of the general settings.
5

It got broken again in Unity 2020.3.20f1

With this configuration: 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M, I am getting jittering with default Interaction Mode, but also with anything that comes near my Monitor Refresh Rate (16 ms). Trying various Frame Throttling values, I feel to have found the sweet spot at 23 ms. No idea why this particular number, since my display works at 60Hz - apparently, some sort of a bug in Unity.

3

Unity seems to in fact be on drugs.
I randomly started having a huge 1-2 seconds lag in the editor, could barely even click the buttons. Restarted my computer and all, lag was still there. I disabled all components in my Hierarchy, reenabled them, and now the lag is gone.
???