Particle Render Issue IOS Unity 3.5.5f3

Target Platforms Mobile
1

Hey,

I am a developer in a team of students creating an Ipad game with Unity 3.5 (PRO) We have encountered a rather big performance issue with particles on the Ipad. I did some research with the profiler and found that IOS can simply not handle particles.

Below is the example of what we are rendering:

Here is the performance drop when drawing the top image:

The two materials and shaders we use:

No matter what shader we try, it is always laggy on the Ipad. I have googled around a bit, and discovered that it might be because the Ipad has some trouble with overdrawing on the z buffer. Why is it that this only happens with particles though?

Does anyone know if this is fixed in Unity 4 (IOS/PRO) ? If so, we could consider upgrading to 4.

2

You are correct, mobile devices have a lot of issues when you draw something on top of one another. In the case of particles it’s a bunch of tiny little images getting draw all over the place. What you can do is make your texture you are using have more of the rain drops in it, and lower the number of them being spawned. Something like 5-10 should be okay but don’t take my word for it. If you are trying to draw 50+ your going to have a lot of issues.

3

The particles and leaves are representing a wind flow. Your advice is be to combine say; 4 streaks into 1 particle texture, and draw 4 times less particles in total?

4

I am still having this problem. Does anyone know if Unity 4 solves this problem?

5

Theres nothing to solve if its excessive overdraw issue. Use the mobile shaders as the one in screenshots are not. Which iPad did you use?

6

  1. use a faster shader. that is far from the fastest.

  2. use the new resolution controls to render a smaller buffer in unity4 or just render game to a lower res texture.