I am working on a Unity game (a “2d” platformer). So far early in the process. I have a scene of about 50 “meters” wide and a camera which is about 9 meters tall (in terms of what content it covers vertically).
This runs great, at 80+FPS. I have a few low poly platforms and bridges, a low poly humanoid and some boxes.
Now, a designer has repeated the same assets, and extended the test level to being around 200 meters wide. The problem is, now the performance has dropped to 25-31 FPS.
The weird thing is, at least to my understanding of game engines, that it seems to be only caused by the extra geometry that was added. There are no extra scripts running, no extra checks, particles etc.
Basically, if I delete half of the geometry (off screen geometry), and test the game, the FPS doubles.
I am using Unity Free, and I understand that Occlusion culling is only available in Pro, but this seems to be a Frustum culling problem. (since it’s a sidescroller)
Shouldn’t geometry that is off screen not impact the rendering performance at all?