Possible Island demo performance problems

I just downloaded the Unity 2.0 Indie demo and when I built and ran the Island demo the following messages were displayed:

Note: water reflections not supported on this computer
Note: high detail terrain textures not supported on this computer
Note: reducing draw distance (slow GeForce card detected)
Note: turning off soft vegetation (slow GeForce card detected)

The performance warnings occurred even when running the demo at 640x480 resolution in both windowed and full screen modes with ‘Fantastic’ graphics selected. Please note, I selected the Fantastic graphics option so I could see the Island demo in all it’s glory.

The water reflection problem might be due to the fact that the demo was built with the Indie version as reflections work when running the Web player version from the Gallery, but the rest of these graphics limitations are surprising to me because I am running the demo on a 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro with a 256Mb GeForce 8600M GT graphics card.

As one of the latest video cards out, I’d have thought 8600M GT video card would be more than capable of running the demo with all options on, especially at 640x480.

Are these limitations normal for a system like mine, or is there a problem with my system, Unity 2.0 or the Island demo?

Has anyone else with similar video card encountered these limitations?

Anyone?

Not sure, but you can take a peek yourself in the performance script to see why it’s triggering. It’s not Unity itself that sending the warnings btw, it’s a (quite cool) script included in the demo. FWIW, I ran the demo (in the editor) on my Macbook Pro 17" with Unity Pro, and didn’t get any Geforce warnings. Just some performance warnings (low fps) since I’m unplugged with computer performance set to longer battery time.

Thanks for replying and for the tip about the Performance script.

The performance messages are not displayed when running in the editor, only when running the built standalone version.

From my limited understanding of the script, it appears that the four messages (and their associated effects) are the result of HardwareWaterSupport==IslandWater.WaterMode.Simple (not sure whether these are part of Unity API or another script)

The script incorrectly identifies my video card as being a “Slow” card because the above Water condition is true. According to the script the slow GeForce cards are the 5200, 5500 and 6100 models.

I think the WaterMode is being restricted to Simple because I am using the Indie version, but would appreciate it if someone who knows more than me (almost everyone :)) could confirm that this is the case. If it is Indie, then it looks like I’ll have yet another reason to upgrade (when I can afford it).

Yep, I’m 99.9% certain that your problems is related to building the project with the Indie version. It won’t be able to display reflective/refractive water, which is why it falls back to simple mode. In turn, that may then be why the script thinks you’re on an older card.

Oops, sounds like our bad. The only supported water mode being the indie water aparently makes the preformance script think the card is slow.

We will look into it.

Thanks for your helpful advice, dfvdan… and thanks Yoggy for offering to look into it.