2.6.3: Question for Professional users...

[ArenMook]

2.6.3 has some pretty solid optimizations for Unity 4.1+. I was able to roughly halve the amount of time spent in NGUI in the example scenes (mainly UIPanel.LateUpdate). The performance optimizations affect idle UIs where nothing is changing, as well as draggable panels. These two areas should have the most notable effect. And so to those who are able to try out 2.6.3, it'd be awesome if you could record the "before" and "after" performance and let me know the result. Look for the UIPanel.LateUpdate in the profiler window and keep an eye on your final framerate. Just don't forget to disable VSync.

[Nicki]

I'll do a check on some projects when I get back to work on Monday; I don't have Unity pro at home yet, so no profiler. 

[Nicki]

Ok so I have some results for ya.

I did some tests in Subway, which I would say can count as field testing. The version it was using before was 2.6.0, so it's a comparison between 2.6.0 and 2.6.3 on a windows PC of considerable power.

	2.6.0	2.6.3
Front screen (fps)	1280 - 1400	1360 -1600
Front screen UIPanel.LateUpdate (ms) 13 draw calls	0.12 - 0.13	0.06 - 0.07
ScrollPanel - 645 widgets standing still (fps)	~600	~800
Same ScrollPanel UIPanel.LateUpdate (ms)	0.5 - 0.6	0.28 - 0.32
ScrollPanel - 645 widgets while scrolling (fps)	~20 (!)	~400(!!)
Same ScrollPanel UIPanel.LateUpdate (ms)	43.10	1.15 - 1.2 (!)
ScrollPanel scrolling Garbage Collection (size every update)	0.7 MB	112 B (!!!)

[jeldrez]

Ok so I have some results for ya.

I did some tests in Subway, which I would say can count as field testing. The version it was using before was 2.6.0, so it's a comparison between 2.6.0 and 2.6.3 on a windows PC of considerable power.

	2.6.0	2.6.3
Front screen (fps)	1280 - 1400	1360 -1600
Front screen UIPanel.LateUpdate (ms) 13 draw calls	0.12 - 0.13	0.06 - 0.07
ScrollPanel - 645 widgets standing still (fps)	~600	~800
Same ScrollPanel UIPanel.LateUpdate (ms)	0.5 - 0.6	0.28 - 0.32
ScrollPanel - 645 widgets while scrolling (fps)	~20 (!)	~400(!!)
Same ScrollPanel UIPanel.LateUpdate (ms)	43.10	1.15 - 1.2 (!)
ScrollPanel scrolling Garbage Collection (size every update)	0.7 MB	112 B (!!!)

Holly sh*T!!
I want it!

[ArenMook]

...holy shit is right. I had no idea it would be this effective. Now I see why Seon (of Cubemen 2) suggested I call this update 2.7.0 o_O

[ArenMook]

Bumping to the top to perhaps get some more Pro feedback.

[jeldrez]

Ok, I did my own with AfterEarth. I test it in a Samsung Note I.


I recorded some videos of the profiler in each version and then took a pic from the average in different screens. It's attached.


It looks better anyway.

[ArenMook]

Do you have any draggable panels in there, Jeldrez?

[jeldrez]

Yes, but they're deactivated. I didn't post images when they are on.
I use them mostly for long texts.
Why is the question?

[ArenMook]

Nicki's test run suggests that the most notable gain was in draggable panels -- particularly in the area of memory management. His memory allocations dropped from 0.7 megabytes to just a few bytes while dragging. I'm curious if others will observe similar gains.

[jeldrez]

Ohh, I'll test that later and post the results.

[seonr]

We have seen a dramatic reductions in allocations when our UI is both idle and when draggin content.

Our UI Draggable Panels went from 236kb/frame allocations to 96b/frame - An amazing reduction, and has reduced our GC collections for Cubemen 2 on mobile from every 4-5 seconds to less often than every 30 seconds.

Michael is a wizard. W I Z A R D !!

[nameles01]

Hello Aren,

We've been using NGUI for a long time now on a variety of projects and have been very satisfied so far.
Recently we've started creating Flash export builds and quickly ran into serious performance issues on our bottom platforms.
We've been optimizing and our bottleneck has currently been narrowed down to NGUI and it is quite significant.

The recalculating of the panels and the associated garbage collection make a big dent - something which you seem to be addressing here.

I cannot find out how to get the "pro" build / release candidate. If you could provide us with a version I would be very happy to continue my performance optimizations with NGUI and can share my results with you and the other users on the forum.

Edit: found the license page, currently attempting to get a pro license.

[nameles01]

I've acquired a Pro license and have been optimizing with 2.6.3.

On our test rig ( crap pc ) the framerate went from 37.7 to 44.9.
Even more importantly, the big problem we were having with huge garbage collection spikes occuring every ~5-10 seconds vanished almost completely.

We also performed some other optimizations which may be useful to others, namely:
Disable your panels when they are no longer on screen / scale tweened to 0.0001 ( 50% performance increase )
Set your panels to static when they're not moving or when they have stopped tweening ( rotate / move / scale ) ( 9% to 50% performance increase )

Things that made barely any difference:
Cutting down on the amount of UIPanel components ( these show up in the profiler all the time, but their amount does not seem to matter )
Removing a second GUI camera - the difference was negligible.


Kudo's for the improvements in this version, the results are very impressive in the Flash exporter.