When Unity uses a shaderA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary variant for the first time in your built application, the sceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary might stutter. This is because Unity and the graphics driver need to compile the shader variant, and create a pipeline state object (PSO) with the compiled shader code and its related GPU state.
To reduce stuttering, compile shaders and create PSOs before they’re first needed, so that the graphics driver caches them to disk. This is called warming up, prewarming, or precooking. You usually warm up during a loading screen, either when your application starts or while loading a scene.
Note: Some of the APIs are experimental and not ready for production use. The APIs and documentation might be changed or removed in the future.
To warm up shaders on DirectX 12, Metal or Vulkan, use the experimental GraphicsStateCollection
API. This API collects the specific GPU states your project uses at runtime, which modern graphics APIs need to create and cache accurate PSOs.
Follow these steps:
GraphicsStateCollection.BeginTrace
and GraphicsStateCollection.EndTrace
methods to record the shader variants and GPU states your application uses..graphicsState
file, use the GraphicsStateCollection.SendToEditor
API..graphicsstate
file, then use the WarmUp
or WarmUpProgressively
APIs to warm up the shader variants. Both APIs return JobHandle
objects you can use to warm up the shader variants asynchronously.You should create a different .graphicsstate
file for each graphics API you use.
For more information, refer to GraphicsStateCollection
.
Warm up in the following ways:
To warm up a shader variant collection, do any of the following:
ShaderVariantCollection.WarmUp
to warm up the shader variants when your built application starts.To check when Unity and the graphics driver compile shaders and create PSOs, search for the following profiler markersPlaced in code to describe a CPU or GPU event that is then displayed in the Unity Profiler window. Added to Unity code by default, or you can use ProfilerMarker API to add your own custom markers. More info
See in Glossary in the ProfilerA window that helps you to optimize your game. It shows how much time is spent in the various areas of your game. For example, it can report the percentage of time spent rendering, animating, or in your game logic. More info
See in Glossary:
Shader.CreateGPUProgram
for Unity creating a GPU-specific version of a shader variant.CreateGraphicsGraphicsPipelineImpl
for Unity creating a PSO.Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
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