How To Maximize Your Unity Game’s Performance
A game’s performance can make or break the experience. Playing a game that is properly optimized feels smooth and responsive, and it will have a larger audience since it can run on lower-end platforms as well. Game’s performance is the most important thing after mobile game development.
Maximizing game performance can be quite relative to the game that you’re working on and performance tips that may work for one game may be completely pointless for another. While each game may require a different approach to optimization, these are the key techniques you can implement in most situations. There are lots of factors you can implement to maximize the unity game’s performance. and it would be easy for unity game developers.
1. Keep It Simple
I’m putting this first since it should be a general rule for any game that you build. Whenever you design a mobile game you need to determine specifically what you need and, more importantly, what you don’t need to include. I enjoy going back to old scripts or projects and finding ways to make something more efficient, often by stripping down the excess. However, think with performance in mind as you’re designing it the first time.
2. Use the Profiler
Before you start removing lines of code, refining prefabs, and trying to make everything performant, you need to know what is actually causing performance issues. The Profiler is a great way to get an in-depth look at how your unity game is performing. You can find the Profiler under Window>Profiler and it will run when you play your game.
3. Batch Those Game Objects
Often, the visual aspects of a game are going to be one of the big areas in which you can improve performance. Visual elements will impact draw calls. To put it simply, anything that appears on-screen must be “drawn”. Imagine having 100 different draw calls for a scene versus optimizing your scene to have less than 5. Static Batching is used whenever you set a game object to static. This means that the object will not move, scale, or rotate. Objects that share the same materials will be batched together.
4. Reduce and Reuse Textures
Use a Texture Atlas to combine multiple texture maps into one larger texture map. This is a common technique in AAA games and one you should be utilizing in your games. This not only helps to reduce the number of texture maps used, it also makes everything much easier to organize. This has been done to the extreme at times in games like Rage and Doom with the use of Megatextures and virtual texturing. Here is a video describing this technique if you are curious. Learn about materials and textures and their relationship in our Fundamentals of Materials and Textures course.
5. Use Culling to Limit What is Rendered
This is one of my favorite ways to increase performance, but maybe just because I like the way it looks when testing. To understand how culling works we need to take a look at how objects are rendered in Unity. Like many of Unity’s built-in features, there are always great assets that can take it to the next level. One that I’d recommend is SECTR VIS, which gives you better control over what can be rendered when.
6. Optimize Objects that are Visible
Limiting texture sizes and combining meshes are a great way to improve performance, along with culling of all sorts. How can we improve the performance of objects that are not being culled but are too far to see in detail? LODs (Levels Of Detail) are a way to render a lower poly version of a mesh when it’s outside of a certain range. Unity game development companies optimize objects that are visible to everyone.
7. Use Proper Compression and Load Types for Audio
Audio is sometimes overlooked when trying to optimize a game, but it can affect performance just as much as anything visual. Unity supports multiple audio types of which you can explore here. By default it’ll import the audio clips to use a load type of Decompress On Load along with compression of Vorbis. It’s important to note the sizes displayed here. For this one looping audio clip, the imported size is 3.3 MB which adds to the memory needed for our game by exactly that much. The original size is the amount of ram it will take to play that one clip.
8. Streamline Physics Calculations
Raycasts Raycasts are often used to detect other objects for various things like checking distance, weapon impacts, direction, clearance etc. Find only what you need when using a Raycast. Don’t use multiple rays if one will suffice and don’t extend it past the length that you need it to travel.
Ray casts detect objects, so the less it needs to detect the better. With something like Physics. Raycast, you have the option to utilize a Layer Mask which allows you to only detect objects on a specific layer.
