UI elements like dropdowns so heavy make vulkan out of memory

Unity Engine
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1

I have a file txt where each lines are read and stored inside a dropdown. I have 61 elements. On unity all works fine but after made an apk, it crashes on android and with adb and stuff i saw the log and it says vulkan out of memory. i check on unity with the profiler and when i click on the dropdown, the fps goes from 100fps to lower than 20 and if i read correctly the profiler, all the stuff was rendering, most of it.

For the fact that each elements of the dropdown list is made by a parent with toggle component and 3 childrens, for 61 elements, i have in total 244 gameobjects when i click the dropdown instantiated. So instead of instantiate on play, i made a custom dropdown where all is already instantiated, each elements just 1 gameobject and it works.

I have still issues with another dropdown where i listed all the alphabet so 26 elements if i can recall correctly and in some devices the game still crashes.

But why? Why Dropdown component is so heavy? am i doing something wrong? I wasted my time making a custom dropdown made by me that is lighter. Why unity has such heavy stuff for the UI?

I thought about it a lot and have some conclusions. The Text component, is really blurry so i scaled the gameobject really small increased the width and heigth and increase the fontsize to 300 so the text results really high quality. is it possible that the text is the culcript? or im not alone and you also have problems with dropdowns?

2

Hard to say. Unity isn’t really a generic “make any UI you want” kinda system like you might use on websites. Unity is geared towards simple game selections which only have a few options usually, not like a massive bunch of options. If you need a massive number of choices, something that pages in only so many at a time might be another solution.

As with all performance issues, the best place to start is with the Profiler to find out what is really slowing it down, and that would be accessible via Window → Analysis → Profiler.

3

This is a known issue with the default text renderer, and why Unity is now shipping with TextMesh Pro, which uses SDFs for sharp font rendering at any size. It may be worth trying to replace your text objects with TMP and see if it helps at all.