Very strange geometry issue, causing huge drops in frame rate

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
1

Hi folks!

I have quite a strange problem to solve and was wondering what you guys think about this.

I am working on a fairly huge polygonal object (very detailed architecture). I split it down to multiple sub-meshes to get it under the 65k barrier. What I am observing now is that, in a naked Unity scene with nothing else in it despite a camera and these objects with their standard shader assigned, some of the objects are killing frame rate quite seriously. When I switch them off, the statistics window reports a frame rate of 550 fps (rendering 1.0M Tris, 1.5M Verts, 213 Draw Calls on a 1920x1064 resolution), which is great. But when I turn these objects back on again, I am running at 3.3fps (now rendering 1.8M Tris, 2.7M Verts, 239 Draw Calls on the same resolution), which is, of course, catastrophically bad. Especially considering that I have only very few (26) additional draw calls to render, with a combined triangle and vertex count difference (+800K and +1.2M respectively) that should be no problem for a ATI HD 4870. When I switch on only one of these problematic geometries, the frame rate drops from 550 down to 75 in an instant. Switching on a second problematic object cuts these remaining 75 fps in half. And so does every additional one.

These problematic geometries seem to differ in no way from the other 213, that are drawing just fine.

So what I want to know from you guys is: Have you ever encountered a similar problem, and if yes, were you able to put a finger on the problem? I'd appreciate every hint that helps me to get this resolved. Thanks in advance!

3

I'd take one of those objects apart together with a good-working one, load them into the 3D editor, and look for any differences in the geometry. Maybe the problematic object has single triangles instead of triangle-strips, or overlapping geometry, or something like that. If you cannot find anything relevant, I'd try subdividing that object into smaller ones until finding the exact portion of the geometry causing the issue. This should make easier to find the cause of the problem.

2

Do any of these objects have colliders?

4

Can I suggest you make sure that all objects transforms are scaled to 1 (e.g. don't use the transforms on the objects in the scene to resize objects). If objects are the wrong size in relation to each other, fix it by setting the scale at fbx import stage.

This was an issue that I had when certain meshes killed the framerate.