Terrain Trees causing slow framerate

Unity Engine
1

Since upgrading to Unity 4.3 I am facing a big problem.

Even one terrain with only billboarded trees significantly slows down the framerate. I dont use any Occlusion Culling btw. It was not neccessary.

I tried varying the terrain values und reimporting the used tree assets. No luck.

I really need help because I can’t downgrade to Unity 4.1, loading a scene with an older version ends in a deadlock.

Edit: Also started a complete fresh Project, added a terrain to the scene, placed trees, set billboard very low, set max mesh trees to 0. The result is still the same

If I downgrade this fresh scene I get 999+ errors with the message:

typeTree.m_Children.front ().m_Type != SerializeTraits::GetTypeString (NULL)

Maybe this helps a developer to reproduce?

1540825--89649--$Terrain Trees Render.PNG
1540825--89649--$Terrain Trees Render.PNG932×555 136 KB

2

I appreciate any help, any hints, any advice! As long as this is not fixed, I am stuck. I can’t make a dev build because the framerate drops to 20 fps on a pretty powerful system (i7, amd 7870, 8gb ram) because of this bug.

3

If you can’t downgrade and you want to use the terrain tree system, I don’t think there is anything you can do but wait and hope it gets fixed soon.

4

Well, I would like to know if the devs know about it… But apparently they don’t care.

5

Yeah, can we have confirmation that this is being dealt with?

Thanks

6

Hey there,

Could you please send a bug report and post the case number here? That way I can process it as soon as possible.

Best wishes,
Ugnius
Unity QA Team

7

Thanks for your help Griautis,

with bug report you mean a small scene to reproduce the problem?

8

Yes, a repro project will speed up the processing of the bug report immensely. Which will allow the developers to fix it as soon as possible.

9

Is there a bug report for this now?

10

7

11

Make sure to vote to fix this bug: Unity Issue Tracker - The amount of mesh trees being rendered does not change when changing the Max Mesh Trees value

12

Wrong bug. This one is so much more debilitating than that one.

13

If it’s a different bug you should add it; I assumed it was because the number of mesh trees was too high.

14

No, haven’t seen one.

15

Not sure how a person would create a test scene that will show you the performance drop between versions (which is what people are saying has happened).
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/224212-Max-Mesh-Trees-setting-broken
It doesn’t have much to do with max mesh setting being broken though, as you can set the billboard start to 5, and it still performs poorly.

Unity should just run one of their own demo scenes that contains trees. They can compare the performance between 4.3 and an earlier version, like 4.1
I’m guessing that 4.3 performs worse.

I tried reproducing this on a flat terrain and massplacing “BigTree”, but for some reason unity wouldn’t give me the correct stats, it’s like they were they were being throttled.
It kept saying I was running at 60-70 fps whether I had anything in the scene or not, so I was not able to measure difference in such a simplistic contrived scene to see if I was getting a performance drop.

16

Thanks alot, these were my exact thoughts about that, too. I just created a bug report without a sample project or something like this. I added the profiler screenshot I showed in this thread. But so far no answer or anything else…

17

You could try replacing the trees with models as a work around.

18

You probably had VSync turned on in the Player properties.

19

Could you please post the case number here? (or send it to me by a private message)

20

Where can I find the case number? I haven’t received any email.

@NA-RA-KU: Could you try to create a test scene with VSync off and send another bug report? Maybe it works this way. I won’t be on my computer with Unity for a few days, that’s why I ask.