Any plan to write super detail URP / HDRP performance documentation that sort by platform that clearly tell u the performance characteristic of each feature and whether it’s suit for like Android/iOS mobile platform or PC or Switch and etc. So developer can clearly understand performance characteristic for each feature to suit their target platform super well.
Edit: I think it’s also much better to provide a complete table to list down every feature, performance cost and recommended platform
For me this mostly would seem like a percentage performance hit per feature on tiled and non tiled GPUs.
Doing every graphics API, platform and more would be a massive undertaking (a great one, but if it’s that or actual improvements, I’d say improvements)
Hey,
Honnest answer here, this is not something we can afford. Variant complexity here is insane (tons of platform x driver version x all properties for a features influencing the result x resolution x game scenario).
When doing a game, the best Unity could offer is good profiling tools and marker for all platforms to allow to quickly identify what is the bottleneck. This is what matter. Features can imply a lot of differents system (think about a crowd system) and giving raw numbers for a feature in isolation for an unreleastic scenario / toy scenario will not be representative or any help for your project.
What we plan to do is to add more information on performance / impact of properties and will give some expample of performance for a given resolution on a fixed platform (like console). But we will not deliver something detailed as you are describing it.
I would like to provide more context that I expect performance documentation that at least able to tell which feature is costly at low end platform like android mobile platform and also the suggested parameters to tune.
Thanks for the extra context,
We plan to provide more documentation (both general and platform-specific) on the following topics in the future, but I cannot provide an exact timeline yet:
How to configure and optimize lighting and shadows.
How to use profiling and debugging tools to optimize a project for performance.
We’ll try to find a good way to describe performance characteristics of features, thanks for the suggestions in this thread.
Thanks for the reply. The main reason I mention is specially for URP now there are more and more features shipped and it’s really hard for me to know which feature is very costly for performance for mobile platform and maybe some features are slow at certain platforms.
Would some general categories like “PC and console” and “Mobile” be enough, or would you expect more granularity?
As for how to describe the performance impact:
We have some performance notes on the following page (search for “performance impact” string):
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@15.0/manual/post-processing-ssao.html
They are not platform-specific, but do notes like “Performance impact: High” or “Performance impact: Medium” sound useful to you?
There are already some great information here, but also let me add some more info.
We have been already been documenting platforms differences and limitations in feature pages. One example, Decals in URP support two techniques: DBuffer and Screenspace. In the doc page we mention that DBuffer requires the DepthNormal prepass, which makes the technique less efficient on GPUs that implement tile-based rendering.
As another example we have a platform section information when describing depth priming option in URP. Some of these platforms differences and tradeoffs are also communicated in editor with warning icons when you target a mobile platform.
We have an upcoming blogpost to be released next month about Lighting and Performance in URP for 2021.
I definitely also recommend a read on the URP e-book Introduction for Universal Render Pipeline for Advanced Unity Creators
PC and console and mobile maybe should be enough since currently my production mainly target for android mobile platform that I would like to know what’s best setting for android platform. For switch platform does it still consider as mobile platform? But still I think more granularity is welcome. On top of that, I think it’s even better that official can provide us the best graphics settings from low - mid - high- ultra for mobile and PC and console by default. Even better if official can provide best graphics settings specifically tailor for every platform.
I really recommend checking regularly the materials at https://resources.unity.com/
In particular:
Introduction to the Universal Render Pipeline for advanced Unity creators
The definitive guide to lighting in the High Definition Render Pipeline (Unity 2021 LTS edition)
Ultimate guide to profiling Unity games
We need good gpu profiling tools for Android that work with Vulkan and opengl.
I want a single number I can look at that tells me how long this frame took to render (gpu work) excluding all the fluff like vsync and other “sync” logic which typically makes it impossible to get good profiling numbers.
I’ve been a Dev for years and I still don’t know an nice and easy way to figure out if a shader change will improve out worsen performance in my game. I just have to rely on theory because it feels impossible to benchmark, and I always get conflicting answers and results.
I think the current missing e-book is mobile platform URP advanced e-book focus e-book that solely talks about only features, optimization, best practice and etc specifically for mobile. Currently all the URP related e-books are talks about URP generally. And this e-book will have version number and will keep updating when new URP version is released. I would like to see more about URP mobile game focus e-book. I believe Lighting and Performance in URP for 2021 e-book will also not mobile focus yet.
Previously I’m thinking about URP performance documentation for every platform but I guess what I really want is just mobile focus documentation that I can directly know all the mobile only features and avoid using pc or console features that impact performance a lot for mobile platform.