The Unity Profiler

This Area shows CPU Usage for multiple Unity subsystems during runtime, such as MonoBehaviour components, cameras, some rendering and physics processes, user interfaces (including the Editor's interface, if we're running through the Editor), audio processing, the Profiler itself, and more.

There are three ways of displaying CPU Usage data in the Breakdown View:

The Hierarchy Mode groups similar data elements and global Unity function calls together for convenience—for instance, rendering delimiters, such as BeginGUI() and EndGUI() calls are combined together in this Mode.

The Raw Hierarchy Mode will separate global Unity function calls into individual lines. This will tend to make the Breakdown View more difficult to read, but may be helpful if we're trying to count how many times a particular global method has been invoked, or determining if one of these calls is costing more CPU/memory than expected. For example, each BeginGUI() and EndGUI() call will be separated into different entries, possibly cluttering the Breakdown View, making it difficult to read.

Perhaps, the most useful mode for the CPU Area is the Timeline Mode option (not to be confused with the main Timeline View). This Mode organizes CPU usage during the current frame by how the call stack expanded and contracted during processing. Blocks at the top of this view were directly called by the Unity Engine (such as the Start(), Awake(), or Update() methods), while blocks underneath them are methods that those methods had called, which can include methods on other Components or objects.

Meanwhile, the width of a given CPU Timeline Block gives us the relative time it took to process that method compared to other blocks around it. In addition, method calls that consume relatively little processing time, relative to the more greedy methods, are shown as gray boxes to keep them out of sight.

The design of the CPU Timeline Mode offers a very clean and organized way of determining which particular method in the call stack is consuming the most time, and how that processing time measures up against other methods being called during the same frame. This allows us to gauge which method is the biggest culprit with minimal effort.

For example, let's assume that we are looking at a performance problem in the following screenshot. We can tell, with a quick glance, that there are three methods that are causing a problem, and they each consume similar amounts of processing time, due to having similar widths.

In this example, the good news is that we have three possible methods through which to find performance improvements, which means lots of opportunities to find code that can be improved. The bad news is that increasing the performance of one method will only improve about one-third of the total processing for that frame. Hence, all three methods will need to be examined and improved in order to minimize the amount of processing time during this frame.

The CPU Area will be most useful during Chapter 2, Scripting Strategies.

The GPU Area is similar to the CPU Area, except that it shows method calls and processing time as it occurs on the GPU. Relevant Unity method calls in this Area will relate to cameras, drawing, opaque and transparent geometry, lighting and shadows, and so on.

The GPU Area will be beneficial during Chapter 6, Dynamic Graphics.

The Rendering Area provides rendering statistics, such as the number of SetPass calls, the total number of Batches used to render the scene, the number of Batches saved from Dynamic and Static Batching, memory consumed for Textures, and so on.

The Rendering Area will be useful in Chapter 3, The Benefits of Batching.

The Memory Area allows us to inspect memory usage of the application in the Breakdown View in two different ways:

The Simple Mode provides only a high-level overview of memory consumption of components such as Unity's low-level Engine, the Mono framework (total heap size that will be garbage-collected), Graphics, Audio (FMOD), and even memory used to store data collected by the Profiler.

The Detailed Mode shows memory consumption of individual game objects and components, for both their native and managed representations. It also has a column explaining the reason for that object consuming memory and when it might be de-allocated.

The Memory Area will be the main focal point of Chapter 7, Masterful Memory Management.

The Audio Area grants an overview of audio statistics and can be used both to measure CPU usage from the audio system, as well as total memory consumed by Audio Sources (for both playing and paused sources) and Audio Clips.

The Audio Area will come in handy as we explore art assets in Chapter 4, Kickstart Your Art.

There are two different Physics Areas, one for 3D physics (Nvidia's PhysX) and another for the 2D physics system (Box2D) that was integrated into the Unity Engine in version 4.5. This Area provides various physics statistics such as Rigidbody, Collider, and Contact counts.

We will be making use of this Area in Chapter 5, Faster Physics.