Mobile devices vary in GPU power a lot. Old devices simply don’t have enough power to maintain a decent frame rate while using image effects. Even a simple image effect can reduce FPS a lot on older devices. Medium and high-end devices should be able to run most of the effects fine – the result also depends on the number of effects and options enabled. Follow these tips to get the best performance:
Depth of Field is one of the most complex effects and here’s a video showing it running at near 60 FPS along with bloom, sharpen and other core effects on iPhone 7+:
Consider the following configuration tips to provide a nice quality/performance balance to your users:
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Always provide a set of minimum options in your game menu so your users can enable or disable visual effects according to their preferences. Some users with powerful devices will want to enable all of the effects, while others will want to reduce them or even disable them completely so the game can have a minimum FPS.
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Use “Best Performance” mode. This mode uses less texture fetches and render passes.
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Disable “Depth Based Effects” in Shader Options section (button on top of Beautify inspector). Disabling this option will avoid creating the _CameraDepthTexture by Beautify which can improve performance significantly.
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Try Downscale option. A pixelation/down-scaling factor of 2 can improve performance a lot on mobile. This option can be found at the bottom of Beautify’s inspector (it’s an effect). Since mobile screens have a very high density resolution, a pixelation of 2 might not be noticeable but it will half the processing power required to execute all effects.
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Consider reducing some options under specific effects, like “bloom blur” or “depth of field sample count”.
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Bloom & Anamorphic Flares Layer Mask options can be expensive. Consider disabling these options on mobile, or use the same layer mask for both Bloom or Anamorphic Flares, and for some specific objects only.
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Click “Shader Options” on top of Beautify inspector and disable some features, such as “Dither” which has little visual impact on mobile.
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The “Basic” mode provides a very basic set of options (sharpen, brightness, contrast, vibrance) and does not use depth. This mode can be used as a fallback for even better performance in some cases.
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You game menu should contain the following quality options related to Beautify: “No Effects”, “Basic” (the basic mode), “Normal”, “Great”, … each one can include one or more effects according to your design/preferences.
