How to avoid/migitate this large frame skip?

Unity Engine
1

I have an animation of a ball which the user has to find. Once they do, the ball then goes away and turns into a wall of balls.

The problem however is, when the camera/user look at the balls for the first time, there’s a massive frame skip. This is most probably due to there being around 1000 balls all merged in one location.

The game has no problem running the animation, and it’s quite smooth once it starts. However, the massive frame skip happens before the animation starts, and I can’t find a way to get rid of it.

All the balls use a single material. I turned off light probes, shadows, etc, but the frame skip still happens.

How can I get around the frameskip? The objects are all already instantiated, but I suppose they aren’t loaded into the GPU? How can I force Unity to be fully loaded on the start of the map, rather when the user looks at them?

Profiler before:

Profiler after:

2

Have the camera look at the objects for one frame, then disable them. You can cover this with a full-screen texture (the objects are still rendered).

–Eric