Is anybody else getting really poor performance when using the scene view? I’m not talking about playing in the editor, I’m talking about working in the editor. I think I started noticing some performance degradation around 2017.1ish but now on 2018.1 it’s taken on a whole new level of laggy.
I’m trying to do some level design and currently the Unity editor is almost completely unusable, the performance is that bad. Here are my specs:
i5-3570k
GTX 1070
16GB Ram
Samsung 850 EVO SSD
1440p monitor at 144hz
Windows 10 (fully updated)
Geforce Drivers v398.36 (latest version)
Unity 2018.1.7f1
(Note that I have experienced the same situation for the last year or so with various versions of drivers, Unity and Windows (including a full reinstall) so I know it’s not something trivial like my driver version or a specific patch of Unity. That’s not the problem here.)
I used to get a full 144 FPS in the unity editor and it was smooth as butter. Even in the more complex scenes I was working on the experience was great. Now I get slideshow FPS in empty scenes. When it’s not stuttering (which is pretty constant), the editor is frequently under 30 FPS. Panning or moving around the scene stutters like crazy. Even in the Kinematic Character Controller test scene which looks like this (and certainly should not be a demanding scene on my system) I have such poor performance that I literally can not move the camera where I want because the low framerate makes me constantly over or undershoot my position. I should easily be getting 300+ FPS in these scenes on my hardware.
Again I’d like to reiterate that there have been no changes in play-mode or build performance. This purely impacts my ability to work in the editor and edit my scenes. Recently I’ve been testing out UE4 to see what the difference is like and the performance is night and day. The editor is extremely smooth without any noticeable stutter or framerate drop. When you consider how much more graphically demanding UE4 scenes are out of the box it makes the Unity editor performance look like a joke by comparison, which saddens me greatly. I point this out mainly to highlight that the performance of a stock Unity scene view should easily be just as good or better than the stock UE4 scene view. There is no reason for this not the be the case considering how much more friendly Unity’s default 3D rendering is to low end devices.
I’d really rather not switch over to UE4, but I’ve already waited several releases for this to get ironed out. Maybe nobody at Unity has noticed this and I am some wild corner case?
When I do some deep profiling of the editor in a completely empty scene, in a completely empty project, I get something that looks like the above. As far as I can tell the slowdown (as you can see, below 30 FPS) is caused primarily by over 30ms spent in “GUIUtilitiy.ProcessEvent()” which further seems to be mostly made up of “SceneView.OnGUI()”. So from what I can gather my editor is being slowed down an insane amount because of the scene view GUI (of which there hardly is any)? Even more specifically because of gizmos in the scene view?
This seems ridiculous considering the lack of any substantial scene view GUI. Is my processor really taking over 5ms to redraw this?
For reference, my computer can handle rendering the entirety of a frame of Overwatch in about the same amount of time. So something is not right here. It’s also interesting to note that all of the work is on the CPU and not the GPU, so perhaps the scene view GUI is not hardware accelerated.
Also yes, the profiler does impact performance a bit but even without it when recording FPS with external programs I get similar results. This leads me to the conclusion that there is either some seriously inefficient code in the Unity editor GUI (all software rendering) or there is something weird going on with my system that’s more complicated than what drivers I have.
Well that’s it. I’m interested to see if anyone else has been having similar experiences. Hopefully I can work out a solution because I’m quickly approaching the point where I’m ready to jump ship. Thanks for giving this post a look!