Hello. I’ve reinstalled Unity 2022 just in case it was a bad download. My Nvidia drivers are updated (555.85) plus Windows 11 is up to date. I have a Lenovo All-In-One with a GTX 1650 and 8GB Ram. I’d say this 1650 was a smaller, less powerful card than a desktop as to fit in the case. My Lenovo is around 3-4 years old by now.
With the newest 2022.3 version, a new install of 3D Game Kit Lite and a new scene, my all-in-one will start to heat up after 1 minute (shadows, AA, post processing, sky box) with just a plane to walk on and Ellen animating.
My heart dropped when I disabled all effects, sky boxes, real time lights, setting the quality and graphics all the way down, used a basic colour sky, setting the graphics tier to 1 with all the check boxes disabled, plus setting the build setting to Webgl.
Here’s a basic scene with most cpu/gpu stuff gone but still starts to overheat after 5 minutes.
I don’t think I can explain everything in the first post (that’s not like me at all), so will wait and answer any questions if needed. The profiler did show a bump just before the fan whirrs loudly. Cheers.
All-in-one computers are just laptops in a different form factor. Since they lack the space requirements for a proper cooling solution (ie lots of metal and a large fan) they have to make up for it by spinning the fan really hard. It might sound like it’s having trouble but it’s working as intended.
A desktop fan is typically 80mm to 120mm with some as large as 140mm and under a heavy load they will typically spin around 2,500 RPM on the small end to 1,000 on the 140mm models. Air typically has a very wide and open path to travel minimizing noise.
A laptop fan is typically 30mm to 70mm with most of them sitting on the low end of that and under a heavy load they will typically spin around 5,000 RPM with some as high as 7,500 RPMs. Air typically has a very narrow and closed path to travel maximizing noise.
What you’re hearing is very normal for a gaming laptop that has to push everything hard which is the case for game development. It’s very CPU, GPU, RAM, and SSD intensive. Everything has to be pushed so the laptop (or all-in-one in your case) has to run its cooling system at full throttle.
Note that extreme form factor hardware (Apple is famous for this) will throttle to varying degrees. Some of them try to run as hard as they can to push performance as much as they can (very common for gaming laptops), but some of them will clock down to the point the fan doesn’t have to work as hard but in return you lose most of your speed.
The only time you should be concerned is if it’s shutting itself down because that’s what will happen if the hardware isn’t able to cool itself properly. If that’s not happening it means the device is functioning as intended.
The problem is vsync. Without this enabled unity will try to run at the maximum possible frame rate. My 4090 fan sounds like a tornado and runs at 100pc utilization on an empty default unity scene. Why? Because it is drawing 1000 frames per second without vsync. With vsync locked to 60fps the fan doesn’t even switch on. Your screenshot above shows 200 fps.
Note that the unity vsync is buggy, especially when viewing scene view at the same time as game view. search this forum for info.
This time that Unity reports, and it includes the CPU “waiting” and doing nothing.
Let’s say your CPU needs 5ms to produce a frame, that means to produce 200fps (1/200 = 0.005 or 5ms), it keeps working constantly, since as soon as it finishes, it starts working again ← heat gets generated.
Now if you limit your frame rate to say 60 (by say, enabling VSync), your CPU “takes” 17ms, but what that actually is, is that it works for 5ms and then waits and does nothing for 12ms ← hope you can see how this case generates a lot less heat.
Laptop thermals (or more accurately the component thermal requirements) are pretty bad these days, when they do something more intensive than browsing the fans tend to kick in, that’s normal.
Both of these are simple tasks for any computer made within the past decade, and GPUs have special hardware designed to minimize the impact of watching a video. If you want to hear the fan spin up heavily outside of Unity you need to run a demanding game. Something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Anno 1800.
For example here’s the internals of a Lenovo AIO. It’s not the same model (I can probably find a picture if I had the exact model) but it should give you an idea of just how tiny the cooling is for them.
Lenovo AIO
Meanwhile here’s the cooler for just the graphics card of a desktop. It’s an MSI GTX 1650 Super Gaming X. It’s size is about 10 inches long, 5 inches tall, and 1.7 inches thick, and that’s a small cooler for a desktop GPU.
GTX 1650
Just as an example of how crazy desktop cooling can get here’s an RTX 4090. I don’t know the exact dimensions but most of the time they’re 14 inches long, 6 inches tall, and 3 inches thick. That’s at least five pounds of metal.
RTX 4090
You need braces for these things because they will warp the motherboard slots and in some cases even break them. Some gaming motherboards will ship with special reinforced slots to be able to better handle the cards which helps but you’ll still see sagging cards if you don’t have braces too.
PCIe slot that was broken by the GPU
Another part of the problem is that your model isn’t that much slower than the desktop model. It’s only about 10% slower (before thermal throttling which will be near instant) while the cooler is a fraction of the original size. So you’re essentially cooling a desktop card with a laptop cooler.
I’ve resolved the thread and from what I can gather there are lots of settings within Unity that will help reduce load. I may offer some tips when/if I find an answer. Enjoy you day
