Worried about performance RX480 a huge bottleneck?

Unity Engine
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I’m working on a 3rd person rpg kind of like WoW and I am using HDRP My scene is still pretty empty and I’m struggling to maintain 45 fps on 1440p on the highest preset for HDRP. I get 85 fps on “Performant” mode 1440p. up to 120fps in performant mode 1080p. The scene is practically empty, just a plane for the ground, which is textured, and a couple trees/rocks random objects.

I was worried from the start when my empty seen was only getting like 140fps in 1440p (totally empty no objects or scripts).

I’m thinking it is probably my GPU? I’m using an RX-480 which is obviously pretty old. Everything else on my comp is bought in the last year, 32g ram, Ryzen 7 2700X Eight-Core Processor 4.20 GHz

I’m hoping the RX480 is just a huge bottleneck and that if I upgrade to a 7900 or 3090/4090 that my fps will skyrocket.

I guess theres only one way to find out, I’m rebuilding everything using URP to see the difference. I’ve been working on the game for a month, but 95% of the work is in the scripts I’ve written, the actual game world and graphics are nearly empty, so it shouldn’t take long to copy the scripts over and hook them up.

WIth the emptyness of my scene, I would hope to have close to 200 FPS but as I mentioned above I’m not even close to that.

Any thoughts on the graphics card issue?

I don’t plan on being done with the game for years, so by the time it’s released, maybe performance wont be a problem? Does it make sense to stick with HDRP if I’m not planning on releasing the game for a couple years, and just assume it will run find on most hardware by that time?

I’ll post a video of my scene shortly

Thanks

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Here’s a video so you can see how empty the scene is

Obviously I’m having problems recording, it’s a slideshow. I’m using OBS and turned the settings all the way down to 720p and still cant record. How do you guys record your games?

Still you should be able to tell how empty the scene is even with the poor framerate

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  1. To see where the issue is, check task manager, profiler, frame debugger, etc
  2. You say you have an empty scene, so disable all features you do not need from the HDRP settings
  3. If you want the best performance, think about switching to URP. URP can still look very good, and runs on all hardware. HDRP has no mobile support for example.
  4. When your hardware is bought matters nothing. It matters when it was released. The 2800x already is 5 years old (but still a decent CPU).
  5. Don’t upgrade just because. If you want players with a 480 to play your game, make sure it runs on that as well
  6. I also use OBS, but changed the recording settings quite a bit
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Only way to know is to profile, you’re flying blind right now. Unity profiler is very easy to use, check this guide:
Other - Guide to unity profiler: HDRP version (And how to read GPU & CPU profiler data) - Unity Forum
That way you can tell exactly how long your GPU is taking to do its work, and also the CPU.

Your current GPU is very weak, it’s around 45% slower than a GTX 1070, which itself isn’t that good, which itself is very old. Also 1440p with your GPU is a stretch, but if you insist on 1440p, use upscalers such as FSR/TAU.

Your CPU isn’t horrible, but it’s not that good – with unity all that matters is single thread performance, for the most part. You can tell how it’s doing with the profiler. If you build the game though, CPU will perform better as it can multithread some graphics overhead that it can’t do in the editor. Most likely your issue is the GPU, so upgrading your GPU should help.

Also don’t look at performance with FPS, ‘ms’ is more accurate. For example going from 2 FPS to 4 FPS sounds small, but it’s a massive difference; 2 FPS is 500ms, 4FPS is 250ms.

And 60 FPS is 16.6ms, so 250ms difference is huge.

HDRP has some overhead, so testing with ‘empty’ scenes isn’t great, it’s better to test with scenes that are more similar to real projects with some objects/light/shadows etc.

HDRP scales better than URP, so if you’re going for something complex it’s a good solution.
Almost everything runs on compute (on the GPU), unlike CPU where things like SSAO/TAA run on the CPU, and thus are much more expensive compared to HDRP.

And by default HDRP has post processing on with things like motion blur, which is quite taxing on your GPU, you can disable it from the global settings.