Same Project, Faster Computer, Slower Framerate

I've followed along with the Rollaball tutorial and the game works fine and runs as expected in the Unity 4.5.2 dev environment and when built as a web player on my laptop while on what should be a more powerful tower, the response is jerky even when I have copied the saved project verbatim and rebuilt it. I have also verified that web players built on both machines run well on the laptop and jerky on the tower. I adapted the FPS script from the archive of unifycommunity to show the FPS rate n the "You Win!" text area, and the laptop runs at a smooth 59.xx while the tower runs about 7.xx but once spiked to 9.xx.

Acer Aspire 4830TG laptop has 64-bit Win7, 8GB RAM, Core i5 at 2.5 GHz, Nvidia GT 540M + Intel HD 3000

handmade tower with 64-bit Win7, 4GB RAM, AMD 6100 six-core at 3.3 GHz, Nvidia 550Ti + 660Ti

 

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This happens with and without other apps running. Could the 4GB RAM be the bottleneck?

It's a relatively new tower and I haven't loaded other FPS-critical apps on it before unless you count video streaming, and it plays you ube and Amazon Instant just fine over the university's fat pipes using the Chrome browser. The laptop's streaming is handicapped by the at-home shared internet connection, but plays local videos pretty well.

Could there be some project-independent settings in the dev environment that need twiddling?

 

You could test the Unity Cube Mark on both machines (link in sig).

Also note that there has been some speed optimisations made to 4.5.2 patch 2 (note that patch builds for the web only work on your dev machine(s)).

There is also the usual advice to check you have the latest drivers.

 

Unity runs just at one core by default. It is single threaded. Maybe that's the culprit. A newer pc has more cores most of the times. That's what makes it faster, usually. But it can happen that a single core of the new cpu is weaker than a single core of the old cpu. I had this before.

 

Thanks for clarification

 

Laptop / Tower
18690 / 20202 2d Mark
14115 / 29623 3d no colliders
8849 / 6976 3d colliders
41654 / 56801 Cube Mark

Is this interpretable?

EDIT: As for patches, the About dialog says my version is 4.5.2f1 .

 

It just gives you a guideline or heuristic for how many simple objects Unity can throw around on your machine. OK so there is not a big difference in Unity 3D between the two machines.

You can get the latest patch build from the Announcement forum patch thread, I would give it a try as it seems to use more processing power and provide more rendering performance (4.5.2_p2)*

* I have not tried p3 yet.

 

I tried p3 on the tower and the Unity dev framerate quickly drops to 3.00 flat, which is suspicious by itself. CubeMark doesn't show me a framerate, but the video shown looks just fine, not even a little jittery. Rebuit web player plays at 7.xx.

I've just gotten notice of the Nvidia 340.52 driver, so I'll upgrade from 337.88 and see if that helps.

 

Interesting.. I would have expected slower results on the laptop because with that setup unless you've right clicked and chosen "Run with high performance graphics processor..." it's going to be using the Intel chip (unless you've set the NVidia GPU as the default).

There is a possibility... one or more of your shaders could be using a fallback on your laptop that is a simpler shader while on the desktop they are using capabilities that are more taxing.

 

Dustin, where would I look to check the shader in use? The images seem identical.

Also, I have now updated the tower to 4.5.2p3, updated the Nvidia drivers to the latest available, and unplugged the 550Ti to prevent any kind of conflict in deciding between the 550Ti and the 660Ti, and now it runs the web player in the 9.xx range, the dev environment plays at about 3.xx. Not encouraging. I did see that Unity already had the latest PhysX installed, so that part of the driver update did not go. Could that be a conflict?

I think my next step would be to try to reinstall Unity, then repeat the tutorial to see if there is ever a point where the FPS is normal, then drops off at a particular step.

 

Jeez... honestly I have no idea. Have you already used your Unity Pro trial? Any way you could run the profiler?

 

I might just need to try that.

For reference, I have now gone back to 4.5.2f1 on the tower and the frame rate is now a blazing 3.xx under the dev environment.

 

I have set up Unity 4.5.3fsomething on a third machine, an older laptop, and it hums along just fine at 59.XX FPS on Rollaball. I have also reversed the tower from the 660Ti to the 550Ti and still have the slowness. I belive that I will have to sic the profiler on the issue, but since I actually have two systems running at full speed now, I can finish my project efficiently and worry about the tower's constipation later.