Unity5 render at half resolution

Unity Engine
1

So I’m trying to get Unity to render at (for instance) half resolution to get better performance. I first created a script that added a new camera with a plane in front of it, then made the original main-camera render to a texture, and then I showed that texture on the plane. This works.

However, I then found out about the method Graphics.SetRenderTarget(…). It sounded very promising. But it doesn’t seem to do what I expected it to.

So I tried the following:

RenderTexture texture = new RenderTexture(Screen.width / 2, Screen.width / 2, 16, RenderTextureFormat.ARGB32);
Graphics.SetRenderTarget(texture);

But this doesn’t seem to change anything. I was hoping this would make Unity render at half resolution. (I tried this in a ‘Start’ method, as well as in ‘Update’.)

Don’t I understand the functionality of this method. Am I using it wrong? Is there something I’m not aware of? Or is there a better way of doing this?

2

The resolution at which things render depends on the ratio between the camera settings and the size of the rendertexture. Make a half-size rendertexture and the same scene (if the camera scales accordingly) will be half size.

3

I don’t really follow this. You mean it’ll render half the scene on the same resolution or?

Because when I set the render texture to half the size (as in my original post) literally nothing changes that I can see.