Rendering Optimization

Unity Engine
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1

Hello All,

I’m having a serious problem getting high frames solely on Windows Phone 8. My game runs fine even on old iOS devices and low-end android devices. I’ve tried the obvious reducing texture size, still nothing… slow frames! I remember in the Unreal Engine there was a way to reduce the render resolution on the device itself when exporting to iPhone; is there a way to do that for Windows Phone? I have a feeling the display’s resolution is too high for the hardware in most Windows Phones phones.

or Could it be that there are certain method calls that worked better in Mono.net than in Microsoft’s framework, and I’m missing out on a few things?

Thanks,

2

Hello, are you building the game in release/master configuration?

Furthermore, did you try using the profiler to find out the root cause of the problem?

3

Yes the game is being built in the master config, unfortunately though we are using Unity Free to build this game so we don’t have the profiler …

4

I stumbled across this the other day in my attempt to do GPU profiling on an ARM device… you might be able to use visual studio profiler?

(general performance profiling) App profiling for Windows Phone 8 | Microsoft Learn

(directx related, but might be helpful) Profiling Direct3D apps for Windows Phone 8 | Microsoft Learn

5

Which phones are you testing on? If the phone gets hot, it’s the CPU that’s limiting you. If it doesn’t, it’s most likely the GPU.

6

I’m seeing the same performance gap between iOS/Android and WP8 as well. I’m using Unity 4.2.1 Pro, building Master versions in Visual Studio, and testing on a Nokia Lumia 920. I haven’t been able to profile thoroughly yet, but I’ll post my findings here when I do.

As Tautvydas mentioned, the Lumia is heating up quite a bit, so I imagine I’m slamming the CPU a bit too hard. I read in this thread that accessing .gameObject or .transform are heavy hitters, so I’ll try to cache them as recommended by Tomas. I also forced my textures to a compressed format, which seemed to give me some performance increase, but not significant enough to call it a day.

Here is another WP8 performance related thread you might want to check out:

7

To give a quick update:

For whatever reason, I’m unable to connect my Lumia to the Unity profiler (WP8Player doesn’t appear in the Active Profiler pull down menu, and entering the phone’s IP address manually doesn’t seem to connect it either). I profiled a bit in Visual Studio, and it seems that perhaps setting the color of objects (UnityEngine.Mesh.set_colors32) might be the bottle neck for our specific code. We have a ton of tiny interactive sprites on screen that need their colors and opacities changed constantly.

Also, for reference I’m using 2D Toolkit with the tk2d/PremulVertexColor shader for most sprites.