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unity-game-enginecompressionmesh
Mihai-Daniel Serban
Mihai-Daniel Serban

Reputation: 21

Does mesh compression increase performance of Unity3D games?

I would like to know whether Unity's mesh compression can increase the performance of a game for low-end hardware.

Does mesh compression make a game less demanding, or is it only useful for reducing file size and the space the game takes in storage?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 8763

Answers (1)

Serlite
Serlite

Reputation: 12258

(Expanded from comments.)

Based on documentation that references Unity's mesh compression, the compression used by Unity will reduce the mesh's size in the game's build files, saving storage space. However, it will not reduce its memory usage when the game is running, as indicated by the quote:

Note that mesh compression only produces smaller data files and does not use less memory at run time.

As such, there is no reason to assume that game performance would be improved by mesh compression.

The mesh is not made smaller by removing vertices/whatnot. Rather, Unity reduces the precision by which it stores mesh vertex data, which in turn saves space. However, when it finally renders the mesh in-game, the mesh will still have the same complexity as before - just a bit less accurate. (There's a lengthier explanation of the topic in this Unity forum thread.)

Unity's mesh compression uses quantization, which is a lossy compression method. So it is worth experimenting with different compression levels to determine what works best for each model - reducing game size in itself is never a bad thing, but will sometimes have to be foregone if your 3D assets visually suffer from the drop in data precision.

Upvotes: 7

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