I have been using NGUI but recently I decided to do one of our new projects in Unity’s new UI system. It was very easy to set up. I have a starting small graphic animate from offscreen to onscreen. I have animated many different objects at the same time using NGUI without seeing much of any performance differences. Animating a single image onscreen dropped my frame-rate from 30 to 10. If Unity’s default UI gives this bad of performance, there is no way I can use it in our projects. Is there something I can do to improve performance? Do you think the animator kills performance and I should switch to something code based like iTween? I’m using one image which is 1024 x 1024. I am using Unity’s animator to move it on screen and then the animator loops in a “rest state” keeping the object there. Once the animation starts the frame rate jumps between 11 and 14. I am testing this on an older iTouch which is our base device we test all our NGUI projects on.
So I have ran a few more tests. It seems that when Unity’s UI isn’t animated it runs great. It’s only when I use the animation system to animate an element I run into issues. I tested animating the same image on a macbook pro with 16gigs of ram, 3.1 processor, and 1.5gb of dedicated video ram. It drops below 60 frames when animating a single image as well. I’m going to try and animate things through code. I’m hoping it isn’t necessarily the UI system causing issues but the default animator inside of unity. (fingers crossed) If it’s the animator I can work around that.
According to my experience, it has nothing to do with the animator but with the recreation of the UI mesh that is responsible for the slow down. There is nothing we can do about it at the moment I fear.
Thanks for the reply Dantus!
Experienced the same issue, just didn’t use an animated image my temporary solution, until the issue is resolved.