USE_OPENGLES20_IF_AVAILABLE Performance Hit

Unity Engine
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1

I’m finding that on the iPad, allowing this default setting in the Xcode project causes an enormous performance loss:

#define USE_OPENGLES20_IF_AVAILABLE 1

By changing it from 1 to 0, my framerate shot upward to where it ought to be (more than a factor of 4 improvement). Is anyone else seeing this? Our app makes heavy use of animated billboards so maybe that makes the ES2 path unoptimized for us? Or is this across other types of apps too?

I’m glad someone at UT had the foresight to include this flag, and I hope they don’t take it away unless problems with the ES2 path are fixed.

2

If you disable it but build with OpenGL ES 2.0 target (so the combined in U3) then thats a horrible idea.
in that case you would get away better by not doing a armv6 + armv7 build right from start.

using the es 2.0 if you don’t use armv7 on the other hand isn’t a good idea either as the full shader based rendering needs to be fully used (so optimize your shaders for it, that can make a difference of a factor 5 to 10 especially when transparency and shader based combination prior pushing it into the rendering process comes into play)

3

With beta 7 you should get noticeable performance improvement on OGLES 2.0 path.

4

The point remains though, if you don’t know how to utilise it properly, why bother? :slight_smile:

5

This is with beta 7. It seems to be a performance hit instead of a boost.

6

You should only use ES 2.0 if you need it at this point. There have been significant performance improvements since earlier betas, but it’s not on par with the fixed function pipeline yet for the same shaders.