Profiling and Debug Panels

The Profiling and Debug panels provide useful information about your running Visual Effects, such as CPU and GPU timings, memory usage, texture usage, and various states. These allow you to keep the performance of your effects under control while you author them.

To enable the Profiling and Debug panels, select the debug icon in the top right of the Visual Effect Graph window. All the information displayed in the Profiling and Debug panels refers to the attached GameObject.

Note: For the Profiling and Debug panels to work, the Visual Effect Graph window needs to be attached to a GameObject that has a Visual Effect component. For details on how to attach a GameObject to the working window, see [Attaching a Visual Effect] (GettingStarted.md#attaching-a-visual-effect-from-the-scene-to-the-current-graph).

ProfilingPanel-Overview.png

Graph Debug Information

The Graph Debug Information panel provides information relative to the entire graph.

Section Description
CPU Information
  • Full Update: Indicates the update time of the entire graph on CPU in milliseconds.
  • Evaluate Expressions: Indicates the time spent evaluating the parameters of the graph that are computed on the CPU.
  • System name: Update time of a specific system on CPU in milliseconds.
    		•
    GPU Information
  • GPU Time: Execution time of the Visual Effect on GPU in milliseconds.
  • GPU Memory: GPU memory usage of the Visual Effect.
    • Texture Usage For each system, lists the textures used along with their dimension and memory size.
    Heatmap parameter
  • GPU Time Threshold (ms): This controls the value, in milliseconds, above which the execution times in the panels will turn red. Adjust this value to easily identify expensive parts for your graph.

    • Shortcuts to the Rendering Debugger in URP or in HDRP and to the Unity Profiler are available through the menu on the top-right of the Graph Debug Information panel.

    Particle System Info

    The Particle System Info panel is attached to the Initialize Context of each system. This panel provides information relative a specific system.

    Property Description
    Playing or Paused Indicates the play state of the system.
    Awake or Asleep Indicates the sleep state of the system.
    Visible or Culled Indicates the culling state of the system. The culling state depends on the camera or the scene view, and is based on the bounds. You can set bounds can be set in the Initialize Context, or record and apply them via the control panel.
    Alive/Capacity Indicates the number of particles alive and the capacity set by the user in initialize context. Optimizing the capacity to fit the maximum number of particles alive saves memory allocation space.
    System CPU Update Indicates the update time of the system on CPU in milliseconds.
    GPU System Time Total execution time of the system on GPU. It aggregates the execution times of all the contexts in the system.
    GPU Memory Particle Attributes Size : Memory used for storing the particles attributes for this system. This value scales with the capacity and the number of stored attributes in the system.

    Context Panels

    Contexts debug panels are attached to each context of a system. They are displayed when a context is selected and can be locked to be kept on screen even when the context is unselected.

    Each context will display informations that are relevant to its use:

    Spawn Context

    Property Description
    Spawner State Indicates if the last received event was on the Start port (Playing) or on the Stop port (Stopped). See Enabling and disabling spawn contexts.

    Initialize, Update, and Output Contexts

    Property Description
    Implicitly updated attributes (Update context only) Displays the attributes that are implicitly updated, such as Position, Rotation or Age. See Update Settings.
    Execution time (GPU) Execution time of the context on GPU, in milliseconds. Opening the dropdown will show a breakdown of the different tasks performed by the context. Each entry corresponds to a compute dispatch or a draw call. The number of dispatch or draw call for each task is in parenthesis.
    Texture Usage Lists the textures used in the context, along with their dimension and memory size.

    Note that GPU execution timings are not available on Apple Silicon.

    When using the Visual Effect profiling and debugging tools, take the results as general indicators of performance. Actual performance may vary based on the target devices. You should still profile your scenes on your target devices, using the Unity Profiler.

    While profiling panels are enabled, Instancing is disabled for the attached Visual Effect.