UNITY PERFORMANCE: Checklist for a Top-Performing Game in 2020+

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CHAPTER 1: 

Unity CPU Performance Checklist

Rendering: Use a single camera, especially in mobile

Rendering: Try lighter APIs such as Vulkan or Metal

Rendering: Are you using occlusion culling for interiors?

Rendering: Pre-bake 24/7: lighting, shadows, reflection probes*

Rendering: Create atlases to reduce Unity SetPasses and Draw Calls below 100 on mobile. No multi-material assets (evil asset store)

Rendering: Leave all static and dynamic batching on*

Rendering: Keep particle systems small in world space — i.e. small bounding boxes

Rendering: Are all your particle systems procedural?

UI: Use color property instead of in-sprite color variations and use the new SpriteAtlas tool

UI: Watch "Unite '17 Seoul - Tips and Tricks for Optimising Unity UI"

UI: Avoid per-frame changes in UI components (UI properties or RectTransforms)

UI: Don't use auto-layouting components on dynamic UI

PlayerSettings: Keep only the target architecture you're really building for

PlayerSettings: Use il2cpp in master mode, disable script debugging

PlayerSettings: Use GPU skinning*

GraphicsSettings: Enable only necessary built-in shader settings

Animation: Enable Optimize Game Objects on rigging import settings

Animation: Use animators exclusively in characters. For the rest: custom scripts or tweens.

Animation: Reduce blend tree complexity in animations

Animation: Reduce bone and vertex count for skinning. Aim for max 2 bones on mobile

VR: Use single-pass stereo

OculusVR: Set CPU level to 4*

Unity Scene Hierarchy: Don't forget scene hierarchy static flags on static game objects

Unity Scene Hierarchy: dynamic root objects are less than 3 levels deep and have less than 50 total children

AudioClip (longer ones): Decompress on load and load in background*

Multithreading: Use Burst and tweak the job system job count parameter if needed

Scripting: Coroutines are not endless and use small local variables

Scripting: Use interlaced logic execution whenever possible

Scripting: use CullingGroups to pause out-of-screen subsystems

Scripting (10+ entities): Use your own UpdateManager + ManualUpdates instead of relying on Update. Also, try DOTS.

Physics: Disable autosync transforms end enable reuse collision callbacks

Physics: Avoid mesh colliders; if needed, enable read/write on its mesh importer

CHAPTER 2: 

Unity GPU Performance Checklist

General: No post-processing nor real-time shadows on mobile

General: Use 4x MSAA on (most) mobile platforms

General: Set optimal compression mode for textures, meshes, etc..

General: Use forward rendering and disable HDR on mobile

General: Avoid baked reflection on mobile; RT are forbidden

General: Use 0 (or max. 1) real-time pixel lights on mobile

General: Disable soft particles on mobile

Overdraw: Avoid transparent regions in your sprites. Cut them

Overdraw: Avoid stacking more than 2 UI layers on top of each other

Overdraw: Consider opaque UI with alpha to coverage to reduce overdraw (advanced)

Overdraw: check opaque geometry is rendered front-to-back with frame debugger; this often breaks with batching

Geometry: Use LODs for high-poly models and consider impostor rendering to get < 300k vertices/poligons on mobile

VR: Consider reducing render resolution (backup solution)

OculusVR: Set Oculus GPU level to 4*

Shaders: Avoid multi-pass shaders

Shaders: No standard shader, no GrabPass on mobile

Shaders: Use necessary decimal precision only (half vs float) on mobile

Shaders: avoid sampling from reflection probes

Shaders: Avoid conditionals

Color Space: use gamma instead of linear on mobile

CHAPTER 3: 

Unity Memory Performance Checklist

Capacity: Use indirect references instead of direct references for heavy content

Capacity: Remove direct references to inaccessible content

Capacity: Global GameObjects shouldn't direct-reference heavy content

Capacity: Seldomly used scene GameObjects shouldn't direct-reference heavy content

Capacity: Try texture streaming*

Capacity: Set optimal compression settings for textures, meshes, animations, etc..

Capacity: Disable read/write asset import setting whenever possible

GC: Reduce memory allocations to avoid growing the reserved heap size

AudioClips: enable streaming on long clips*

Performance: Avoid Resources directory

Performance: Preload commonly used shaders to avoid gameplay spikes and strip unused shaders

Performance: Try incremental Garbage Collector to reduce spikes*​

Performance: Use indirect-referenced object pools to reduce spikes

GC: Control GC manually for fine control (advanced)

GC: Avoid garbage-generating methods such as FindObjectsOfType

GC: Aim for less than 32 bytes of memory allocations per frame

GC: Avoid C# boxing

BuildSize: Reduce build sizes with CDNs