X-Frame FPS Accelerator

Community Showcases
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Hi there!

Today we’re proud to announce our new Unity performance tool:

X-Frame FPS Accelerator
Get extra FPS for your mobile game with a click!

The inspiration…

This product is the result of our desire to make possible to use some image effects designed for desktops on our mobile devices and also to be able to reduce/control lag. We found that some nice effects like our own Volumetric Fog & Mist were great but too demanding for mobile devices - same for other image effects like AO, Bloom, Depth of Field and others.

The reason for this limitation is that modern mobile devices come with huge screen resolution (Retina, Super AMOLED, …) that hinders the performance of 3D engines and the common image effect stack because there’re simply too many pixels to process each frame!

We thought, if manufacturers are proud to say that our eyes can’t even distinguish many of those pixels, perhaps we could try to skip some of them from the render pipeline saving GPU cycles and improving FPS. Nothing truly revolutionary indeed but we tried to make it easy to use, flexible and provide fine controls to let choose the quality/FPS range at any time, allowing you to get your game running on mobile devices were it was impossible before.

How it works

The 3 algorithms included in X-Frame FPS Accelerator works basically in two steps:

  1. Makes the camera render to an off-screen surface with adjusted resolution depending on the chosen method.
  2. Once the frame is completed and all image effects stack has finished processing, X-Frame upscales the rendered frame to window size. It can optionally control MSAA antialias and apply our custom fast sharpen algorithm, which reduces blur and improves result vs a normal upscale operation.

Note that X-Frame is aimed mainly to mobile and HDPI screens (high dot-per-inch screens). It’s important to test the effect of X-Frame on the mobile device itself, since usual monitors don’t have such DPI and the quality reduction will be more noticieable on the big screens than on mobile.

X-Frame also controls dynamically both pixel light count and quality of shadows per light in the scene depending on current FPS. It will reduce/restore pixel light count as well as reduce or disable shadows if FPS can’t be achieved. These options can be enabled/disabled in X-Frame.

X-Frame allows you to choose the proper balance between performance and image quality, providing full control regarding the FPS and quality range you want in your game.

Download the FREE demo or purchase on the Asset Store!

We hope X-Frame FPS Accelerator helps your game to reach a broader audience and provide another option to enrich user experience. Remember that this is a tool for those cases when extra FPS are needed to maintain a proper experience - if desired FPS are achieved, X-Frame won’t affect anything.

Try it and let us know how it works for you. Thanks!

Real Samsung Galaxy 6 footage:

Real iPad Mini Retina Display footage:

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Good Job i’m subscribing to this thread and later will try the demo.

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is it only useful if you’re using image effects or can it give a FPS boost to a game that isn’t using any?

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Also without image effects. Remember to check the improvements on the mobile device itself.

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Would love to hear results from peoples projects with this.

1 Like
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Notice the fully functional free download demo from the Asset Store page.

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Hi, I bought this but I’m having a problem. I add the script to my camera and hit play and there is no image, I have to disable the script & re-enable for it to work.

Also, My game switches between different cameras but I couldn’t find any info on this, I add the script to all cameras but should I switch the script on and off along with my camera or is that done automatically?

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Hi @derkoi ,
X-Frame uses a custom camera to render your final image. When a camera to which X-Frame script is attached is enabled, X-Frame will pick it up as the active automatically. I guess something is messing with that and X-Frame is still referencing your old camera due to the way you change between cameras. You should see the image after adding the script in the Editor.
Please contact us at contact@kronnect.me with your cameras settings and how you switch between them. If you could provide us with a simple repro case it will help us find the cause of this quickly.
Thanks.

EDIT: no need to send a repro - we’ve found the issue and will contact you with the update. As a workaround, you need to make sure you disable and enable your active camera AFTER disabling all the other cameras.

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Thanks for the reply. The thing is, I’ve not yet started switching cameras. I spawn 2 extra cameras as part of my game once the player decides where to play and switch to these at times, then back to the player first person camera but I didn’t get that far as the camera is blank when I start the game.

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Hi! I’ve sent you a private message with the update/fix. What was happening is that when a camera is disabled (and X-Frame is disabled), the XFrameCamera object is also disabled. The fix ensures this custom camera is active on the scenario you have.

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I am curious about something;

Lets assume we have a mid-range android device, and my games FPS is around 25 to 35 ( swaps between ). If I use your asset, set the min fps to 30. How will react to my game ? Constantly changes image quality between optimized and normal, it would not be enjoyable. Is there a fixed option which sets image quality fixed ?

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Thanks for your interest. The answer is yes. X-Frame provides 3 operation methods, two of which use a custom quality regardless of FPS.
The adaptative method has also an adaptation speed parameter, which helps you define a minimum time threshold between resolution changes.

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Well that was quick! 10/10 for customer service! Thrawn has fixed the issue and sent me the fix via pm. Can’t ask more than that. I’m still playing with quality vs fps but so far it’s nice to have these tweakable options to play around with.

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I’ll give this a shot shortly … currently my development rig is stuck on a switch platform operation that will likely take most of the day.

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I don’t know why but a few days ago I enabled HFS+ compression on some of big folders on my Mac and after that switch platform operation takes ages. I’m sure there’s lot of compression tasks going on which have doubled after that disk change.

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Thanks :slight_smile:

Remember to test on your real mobile device since the trick here is to take advantage of the huge DPI of mobile screens.

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V1.1 is now available on the Asset Store with minor fixes.
Enjoy X-Frame on your mobile projects!

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Special SALE started today! 25% OFF for limited time.
Try the free demo now and get it at the best price!

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V2 is now available! Check out the new try-and-buy package.

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Hello, is this asset compatible with VR? If so any idea what kind of performance increase this would have using an htc-vive?