Lost 3ms of performance in 5.6 compared to 5.5?

Unity Engine
1

We tried updating our project to 5.6.2p4 but the performance is 30% worse than with 5.5.3p4.

The difference (GIF)
Builds of the game running on GTX 970 and i7-6700K:

Scene setup
One directional light with soft shadows, disabled Realtime and Baked GI, using reflection probes only.
Forward rendering, Single Pass Stereo, no image effects.
Unity terrain and grass, speedtrees in the distance (most or all are billboards from this location), some meshes - here’s exactly what was rendered when benchmarking:

497×547 357 KB

It doesn’t seem like it’s a single Unity feature that’s making it worse, it’s as if everything is individually a bit worse and that those differences sum up to 3ms when everything’s on. What I’ve tried:

  • Turning off shadows (thought that reworked lighting system might be the culprit)
  • Turning off trees
  • Turning off grass
  • Turning off terrain completely
  • Turning off railway
  • (Regenerating Speedtree materials, made no difference)

there wasn’t a single thing in the list that, when turned off, made the performance match that of 5.5. It’s always a bit worse in 5.6. Using the profiler doesn’t give any insight either.

What’s the same?
Stats windows show almost identical numbers in 5.5 and 5.6.

Performance in 2017.1 is identical to 5.6.

I have no idea what we can do to reclaim this performance loss, and we need to upgrade to 5.6.

2

I see, you’re testing in the editor. Tried standalone builds? Not that I’m saying there isn’t a problem with performance, just the editor will vary a lot in how well it runs, forever probably. Unity tinkers a lot. But the standalone should always be rocket smooth.

In any case I think they might want you to file a bug :slight_smile:

3

It’s from the builds, only Stats are from the editor.

4

Then you do need to report a bug, not a poll. Unity will test it for you (if you can isolate it) or even supply them with a link to where they can get the current game source. I think they would prefer a 5.5 build so they can upgrade to 2017 and find the regression.

Otherwise it’s a case of wait and see :confused:

Hopefully someone else will be able to chime in to save you a lot of bother… Sorry I can’t be more helpful.

5

Thanks for the reply. I haven’t gone through such a process before but I’ve many times stumbled on bugtracker issues posted by others with no replies, and from various other instances my first instinct was to count on community rather than Unity, but I’d be happy to provide them with the access to our project.

6

I think they would appreciate it. The bug tracker often has bug reports with no reproduction or it wasn’t the issue they thought it was (this is surprisingly common in a big engine like this as you can imagine). Are you able to take a 5.5 build and upgrade it to 2017 and still see this issue? Really have to eliminate the user error thing :smile: