Mobile Performance and Battery Life - SetResolution vs Target DPI vs Render Scale

[Serge144]

Ok, so I’m trying to boost performance and battery life of my mobile game.

But from my research I see that there are four different ‘knobs’ that improve performance and battery life.

The ‘knobs’ are the following:

1. The SetResolution method
2. Target DPI (Project Settings → Player → [Choose Android Platform] → Resolution Scaling Mode → Fixed DPI)
3. Render Scale (Project Settings → Graphics → [the asset you inserted in Scriptable Render Pipeline Settings]
4. Resolution Scaling Fixed DPI Factor (Project Settings → Quality → Rendering section)

I’m not sure whats the best approach to this. There’s so many ‘Knobs’ that I dont know which should I be using to make a “battery life saver mode” in my game.

Any advices?

Thanks in advance.

[Kurt-Dekker]

As this is a followup post based on this thread here:

Unity SetResolution at the very first scene of the game.

My first scene of the game is a simple loading screen, which will load the Main Menu. Since i’m developing for Mobile (Android), I wanted to set a lower resolution right on the start of this first scene in order to optimize the performance of the game for mobile. I have created this singleton script in this first scene which will change the resolution, (at the Start method). And I do the following: Screen.SetResolution(1080, 540, true); Camera.main.aspect = 2f / 1f; But what happens is the fo…

I’ll follow up my earlier answer:

I stand corrected, as apparently you actually can change the resolution on mobile targets. My information was from an earlier version of Unity where (I recall) the SetResolution commands had no effect.

This appears no longer to be the case, as per your observations above.

However, as observed in the 2015-era post you linked in your previous post, “do less” is going to be the primary big win for performance on mobile. This means less overdraw, fewer drawcalls, less geometry, just less, less, less.