I’m a Technical Writer at Unity and I’ve recently done some work to improve the documentation about the Profiler.
I’ve reorganized the information in the Profiler section for the Unity 6 documentation with the aim of making information easier to find for those who are unfamiliar with the tool. Highlights include:
Most of the pages in the section have generally been improved for readability, style, and minor bug fixes. I encourage everyone to take a look the Profiler section and post any feedback you have. Does this structure work for you? Can you find the information you need?
I’m planning on iterating over this documentation, so if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like more information on, or areas you think are missing, I’d love to hear about that too.
I’m the only writer working in this area at the moment, so please bear with me if it takes a while to action your feedback. I’ll try to keep you updated every step of the way.
Great initiative! I do a lot of performance freelance work and most people just dont know where to start with the profiler. Overal this is a nice introduction, but I do have some feedback points:
Put images in the navigating section, to navigate people more. It starts with ’ Click on the area of a Profiler
module’s chart that you want to inspect’. People do not understand half of this, so are basically stop there
Love the tip to increase the frame count!
Rendering and VSync markers is the best additions! This got so many people tripped up.
I would like to see a faster overview than the marker reference page. Just a ‘common issues’ page that says if you are seeing X, you might have a GPU bottleneck, etc. While this page does have all the details (which has some new stuff even for me after years of profiling), it has way too much info for people to get started imho
Haven’t checked the frame debugger docs, but are these updated as well? It’s a huge help to find performance issues, especially with UI or mobile
Thank you for your feedback - it’s very useful and I agree with many of your points.
I’ll certainly look into adding some more images. We had a bit of an issue where the documentation suffered from screenshot overload and it became a bit of a mess to maintain. That said, I might have been a bit too hasty in removing (or neglecting to include) images in some of these how-to sections.
Absolutely! We have a lot of information missing, or hidden in the documentation. It’s next on my to-do list to create a good home for this type of information. Common issues, what to look out for, how to resolve performance issues etc. We also have some information hidden over in the garbage collector section of the docs, which is a bit of a brain-dump at the moment but contains some other useful snippets.
I don’t personally work on this documentation but my colleague has recently improved the Rendering documentation a lot, and the Frame Debugger docs are now in a section generally around optimizing graphics.
I’d recommend adding a note at the top of the Play Mode and Editor Profile Samples and Collect Performance Data in Play Mode pages, stating that profiling the PlayerLoop in Play Mode displays different performance and memory usage characteristics compared to when it runs in a Player. This is a common issue discussed in the forums, where users often chase performance problems in the Editor that don’t actually occur in the Player.
Great suggestion - I think you’re right that we can be clearer about the implications of profiling in the Editor.
I think I could also be clearer about this in the introduction too. It’s alluded to, but I think I could add some tweaks to put this information up front.
One trick I use is to close as many panels as possible during profiling and setting the game panel to fullscreen. This reduces the time unity uses to draw GUI which can skew the profiling data.
Can you add AI to it so it can automatically diagnose and give me suggestions.
I’m getting fps from 30 to 60 on some mobile devices just by removing 1 render feature on urp.