Performance issues with particle effects

A user I was supporting saw performance drops when their particles were playing. On closer look, the particle texture used was the following:

This meant the game was spending a lot of time rendering overlapping empty space where the texture is transparent.

Reducing the size of the texture so that it was the smallest possible size and least amount of transparent area helped improve performance.

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Ah nice catch! I had a similar issue issue not with particles but with regular meshes/materials when rendering grass.

Using the common billboard approach (plane + 2D texture) resulted in a lot overdraw that reduced performance. Replacing the billboards with actual geometry for the grass blades, even though it increased the total polycount a lot, it actually improved performance even on mobile.

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