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Optimized Unity Compute Shader Particlers

Started by hawksprite Dec 25, 2012 at 5:59 PM 1 replies 5.3k views

Original Post

Dec 25, 2012 at 5:59 PM

So i've been toying with compute shader's to handle particle control and have run into an issue. Everything is working fine so far but there's a bottleneck. When I get up into the hundreds of thousands of particles it starts to lag, I haven't implemented other post processing effects on the particles such as blur and what have you so I'm concerned that there might be a serious performance problem later down the road.

I'll attach the script, shader, and compute shader. I haven't done much optimization yet and i'm not sure how to properly use compute shaders so any advice you guys can give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I just checked and it gets about 40-50 fps with 500k particles.

Part Controller:

http://pastebin.com/zJ9C5Ehx

Part Controller Shader

http://pastebin.com/GB24qttX

Part Controller Compute Shader

http://pastebin.com/zTw6rVAN

MJP

Dec 25, 2012 at 6:44 PM

How large are you particles? It's very easy to become purely bandwidth or fillrate bound when you have lots of particle overdraw, particularly if you're running on a low or mid-range video card. I would suggest disabling the rendering of your particles so that you can try to isolate whether it's the simulation step or the rendering step that's taking a long time. You can also use a NULL pixel shader or disable color writes when rendering which will help determine if you're bandwidth/fillrate bound from overdraw. If that is the case, you can try making your particles smaller or you can try rendering them to a half-resolution render target.

hawksprite

Dec 25, 2012 at 8:52 PM

I did some tests and here's what I found.

With rendering of the pixels on at a short distance (Not right up against it) I got about 42 F.P.S. with 500K particles. Then when you got up close it dropped to about 20-15.

With rendering off (Also not setting the buffers to the shader material) It got the same 42 F.P.S. on average (It occasionally would go to about 70fps for a few seconds). But didn't have the drop off when you got close to where they would be, which makes sense.

So there's a definite bottle neck with rendering up close, but there's also a definite 20 fps drop happening on the compute shader to just control the particles.

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