The final talk of the conference, and the one I was most excited about: "Performance Tips & Tricks from a Unity Consultant."

I wanted to attend this session because one of my favorite talks ever at Unite was on the same topic by Ian Dundore. I learned a lot from it. I even wrote a post about all the tips from that session, which has helped me many times: https://t.me/everydayUnity/1623

While I didn't learn a lot of new things this time, the talk was still very good overall.

Highlights:
- Use native profilers such as SuperLuminal. The Unity profiler shows a very limited call stack, and in deep profile mode, too much performance is consumed by capturing the call stack. Results become increasingly skewed the deeper the stack is.
- Prewarm your shaders and use shader variant collections (SVC). However, SVC is not supported by all graphics APIs.
- More improvements for graphics and shaders are coming in Unity 6, so they encourage updating.
- Use the SRP batcher and ensure your shaders are SRP batcher-compatible.
- Use instancing for more than 100 identical meshes. This is interesting because a few years ago it was suggested that instancing should be used from 1024 meshes. I suppose this should be tested in Unity 6 with specific use cases to confirm.
- I also asked during the Q&A which low-level API he recommends, and he suggested using BRG (I have written a blog post about this as well a long time ago when BRG was just released https://t.me/everydayUnity/1716).
- Avoid quad overdraw. I shared a great post about this some time ago: https://t.me/everydayUnity/1634.
- Basic shader advice: use half/int16 where possible, reduce the number of variables, and minimize texture samples.
- One particularly interesting point was about memory allocations: Boehm allocates memory in 4KB blocks, and a block isn't freed until all buckets within it are free. Because of this, you should allocate long-term memory together so it’s placed in the same block.
- Avoid multiple cameras, as each adds significant overhead. Use render features instead when possible.
- Mix UI and 3D with camera space UI.
- Use the resident drawer in Unity 6 for repeating meshes where draw calls are a bottleneck.
- Avoid duplicates in Addressables. Use the Addressables Analyzer, Build Reporter, and Memory Profiler's potential duplicates tool to find duplicated assets.
- Untracked memory in the Memory Profiler might not be an issue; native profilers can help determine that.