I’ve been recently playing with both Unity and Unreal, comparing both for the use for realtime VFX. One thing that keeps bothering me is that my Unity editor constantly stutters and hitches, regardless of the scene complexity. The stuttering and hitches are equally severe in the empty 3D template scene, empty HDRP scene or full, complex scene.
The reason this disturbs me so much is that there is no reason this should be happening. I have i7 5930k, 64GB of RAM and GTX1080Ti with latest drivers. I tried to disable every other windows program that was not completely essential to running windows, and even the, Unity editor still stutters even in empty scene. Alongside that, I can run UE4 editor with completely overkill scene intended for non interactive VFX, and it still runs butter smooth.
I tried to record the difference on a 60FPS video, unfortunately I succeeded only partially. While the video does show stuttering and hitches of Unity editor, when it’s showing UE4 editor, the recording is not nearly as smooth as the actual interaction I saw was.
Does anyone know why this is happening and if there is a fix? Unity seems to have quite a few things going for it in my comparison, but unfortunately lack of workflow smoothness is a big downside.
@JeffDUnity3D my guess is that he’s talking about around 0:18 when he’s yanking the entire scene around, it’s stuttering a little bit.
@rawalanche I do not know what kind of camera control are you using, but you really should write a better one, Unity is capable of moving the camera perfectly smoothly, of course you need to actually develop it that way
It’s a bit harder to see on the video unfortunately, but it’s just not smooth. It hitches all the time.
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It doesn’t happen only in play mode. In fact it happens in play mode a lot less. It mainly happens when navigating scene view in editor. Obviously, I am not able to rewrite that
Here’s my attempt at better example. I have recorded the video at 120FPS, and then re-exported at 60FPS. So it still runs 60FPS at 50% the speed. It should be more obvious now.
On unity example, you can clearly see that while mouse cursor movement is perfectly smooth, the actual rendered scene movement framerate is inconsistent. It may be harder to see but it’s very easy (and uncomfortable) to feel. Unfortunately, Unreal hides mouse cursor during scene view navigation, but you still can see it’s significantly smoother.
I am really confused about this, as my hardware is more than powerful enough, and I am at the end of my wits when it comes to eliminating any software interference. Especially when Blender, 3ds Max, Unreal and all the other similar 3D software runs absolutely fine.
We experience the same problem, across several Windows 10 PC’s and different Unity versions (5.6, 2017.4 and 2018). Enabling “Animate Materials” in the Scene View reduces the problem for us a little, but it’s not fixing it.
Alright, I was able to push it even further, and record at 240FPS, then re-export at 60, getting 4 frames out of one realtime frame. Now the issue is very obvious:
Unity:
Unreal:
The difference of framerate consistency between Unity and Unreal is significant. Unity is really only piece of 3D software or a game on my PC that ever did anything like this.
I guess I could. Unfortunately I am not really a developer, just an artist. I know basics of profiling in UE4, but I’ve never used Unity profiler so I really don’t know what to look for and how to interpret the data (yet). I tried just opening the profiler panel, clicking profile editor button and selecting one of the frames with the spike. I have no idea what what to read from it though.
@Atair
Hey. Unfortunately I can not test that. I do have 3ds Max, but only 2016. I ended by maintenance at that version, so I don’t have access to any newer ones. That being said. I don’t have HiDPI screen nor do I run any DPI scaling in windows. It’s regular 1920x1200 screen with 100% scaling.
@bjarkeck
Yeah, I think it may be related. As @Peter77 wrote, he has also high polling rate mouse (1000hz). I wonder if unity is actually trying to process all those 1000 mouse events each second.
Yup you’re right, can confirm as well. I have a steelseries keyboard and mouse, both was at 1000hz, lowered them to 250 and it felt a lot smoother.
Even though this fixes it, there are still way more events than necessary firing in the editor IMO. Easy optimization for Unity to make in order to make the editor feel a lot more smooth on a lot of PC’s .
