I do not have any issues with Unity when my Unity game is running.
But I have a lot of issues with opening Unity from cold boot. Mainly, from opening a Unity project to opening a script file from the editor to Visual Studio, the time it takes to update a script file in the Editor after I made changes in Visual Studio, opening Unity scenes, and so on.
I would think that there are some UI performance improvements in Unity 2018.1, after waiting to upgrade since Unity 5.5.1. But I realized, yes, they did, so it’s my issue, not theirs.
Basically a PEBCAK.
So here I am, asking around in the forums, how to improve external, non-Unity development related, performance issues I’m suffering. Note that this is just opening a new Unity project, and the Assets folder is completely blank.
Do I need to update to Windows 10 Spring April Update to see the improvements?
Do I need to clean my hard drive? (I doubt it, since I still have 200GB left on my 512GB drive)
Do I need to upgrade my hardware? (Geez… hope it’s not at this time, because of the expensive market prices)
Do I need to do a clean reinstall of Unity? (I overwrote the old Unity installation with a new one, maybe that could be it?)
^ Unless you maybe have a lot of crazy processes running in the background, @carking1996 is right. Switching from HDD to SSD will give you the best speed boost.
Yeah SSD helps a lot. Of course it depends of the project but even on a relatively large one my Visual Studio starts and opens a project in a couple of seconds and script changes usually compile almost instantly, however I’m also using the assembly definition files for the compile speed.
Visual Studio has a similar performance improvement.
If it’s soldered to the board you may already have an SSD or equivalent to an SSD. We’re going to need to know more about the computer to be able to determine any hardware upgrades. A manufacturer and model number is enough for me to look up the specifications and upgrade potential.
Hard drive soldered to the motherboard is unlikely unless you’re talking about an mSATA flash drive instead of a hard drive. Performance of mSATA flash drives vary greatly, as they are similar to SSD technology but are often designed with size and cost in mind over performance. You can get anywhere from standard SSD performance in some models, down to slower than your typical USB thumb drive, as they are often used in embedded systems with limited drive performance needs.
If you have a slow CPU or limited RAM you will also see a lot of sluggishness.
With the information provided I was able to determine it’s a hybrid drive. It’s a 500GB HDD with 8GB flash. Unfortunately a hybrid drive provides almost no performance gains over a traditional HDD. It’s a severe bottleneck and the main culprit here.
That said this is a performance bottleneck too. Two cores, even with four threads, is very weak now for everyday tasks let alone game development which is very heavy on the processor. Upgrading other components would be a waste of money when this is the CPU.
A full replacement is the only sensible path at this point as even budget laptops (one excellent example linked below) are now shipping with quad core processors, dedicated graphics cards (MX150 is equivalent to a desktop GT 1030), and SSDs.
