Very fast update of 3D lines: Vectrosity or LineRenderer?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

in my problem I need to render about 5-20 3D lines which are updated every frame. In the past, I programmed a solution with Vectrosity which rendered slowly - most likely this is due to my code (i.e. the complicated way in which the line nodes are computed) rather than due to Vectrosity.

Now I am rewriting this code. My lines are simple: They are just supposed to be lines of varying thickness and I want a simple material with alpha channel on it - both LineRenderer and Vectrosity are capable of that. The rest is down to performance, which is my priority.

Purely from the standpoint of convenience, no doubt Vectrosity wins: You can plot as many lines as you like rather than automatically creating gameObjects because you can only have one LineRenderer component per gameObject. Also Vectrosity can do spline interpolation (which may or may not be feasible in my problem).

So performance-wise, what do you say? Remember they have to be 3D lines, 5-20 of them, updated every frame.

EDIT: by updating I mean redrawing from scratch, not adding segments! Not sure how LineRenderer can handle the redrawing…

2

why not just test it?

afaik you need a separate linerenderer (gameobject) for each line when they are not connected whereas vectrosity can put them all in one mesh which results in one drawcall.
and the performance bottlenecks of calculating the points and putting the data on the gpu memory each frame are the same.
and when you have no real performance problems its always better to go with the solution which is better for you (experience, maintainability, readability).