Mario Could you (or your artists) show the stats from the metrics view for each skeleton?

Hey, certainly! Here is the Metrics View for each of the three skeletons we have rendering on the GameScene:

Player:

Opponent:

Crowd:

Mario As a general guideline, have a look at the performance section and see how it applies to your specific setup: http://en.esotericsoftware.com/spine-metrics#Performance

I've read through those guidelines before while we were still working in Cocos2d-x, but it never hurts to read through them again, maybe I missed something or forgot something crucial to the performance here (though these same skeletons ran quite well in Cocos2d-x compared to Unity).

Harald Did you perhaps confuse the two update modes? In Update would be the default, and Manual Update would mean that no automatic update happens and you need to manually call update on the SkeletonAnimation component yourself.

No, and I apologize if my question was confusing. I initially had the skeletons set to Manual Update mode
and was calling Update on the skeleton myself manually within a controller class. I had meant that I commented out the manual calls to Update and then switched the Skeletons to In Update instead of manually calling Update on the Skeleton in the controller class's Update method. I'm not sure whether or not this actually affected performance at this point in time however. I can confirm lowing the number of skeletons rendered from 3 to 2 to 1 all gave performance improvements though. Nearly up to 55 45 FPS for just the Player skeleton.

Harald Thanks for posting the additional info. In general, the skeleton metrics values are all on the high side, which however might be justified depending on your scene setup, having only three skeletons visible. Obviously it would always help to reduce the vertex, bone, constraint, etc. counts, and especially avoiding using clipping polygons.

If you want a bit of extra context, check out Election Year Knockout. We are making a sequel to our game, and so the Spine characters are essentially the entire game, hence the high metric count.

Harald FYI: There is also a section on performance recommendations on the spine-unity documentation page here:

Thanks! I went and read through there, but didn't see any "a-ha!"s or gotchas that I think I might've missed there unfortunately...

Harald You could have a quick try whether disabling clipping at the opponent SkeletonAnimation component improves the situation by changing the Inspector to Debug mode and at the SkeletonAnimation component disabling Use Clipping.

Harald Please also be sure to measure FPS and general timings with Deep profile setting disabled and with release builds, otherwise profiler augmentations might distort the actual timings.

I went and gave these a quick test, making sure I wasn't using a development build/profiling. With only the Opponent spine rendering, and nothing else, we get around 28 FPS on the Android TV regardless of whether or not the clipping is enabled or disabled (we are targeting 60 FPS in game and 30 FPS in menu). The moment another SkeletonAnimations is added (either the player or crowd) we lose about 10 FPS.

Something else I'd like to point out is that the exact same Player and Crowd Skeletons, along with different Opponent Skeletons are currently used in Cocos2d-x and run at around 60 FPS on the same Android TV. I don't think any of us anticipated such a massive difference in performance for the Spine Runtimes between C++/Cocos2d-x and C#/Unity, and it's quite disheartening to be honest since most of our players on Election Year Knockout are on Android TV...

Mario I wouldn't necessarily put the blame on the runtime itself, it sounds like the Unity renderer might be at fault here, especially if the Cocos2d-x version runs smoothly. Our Cocos2d-x renderer is actually a custom thing that directly calls into OpenGL.

If that were indeed the case I'd expect the bottleneck to be in the 'GPU Usage' and not the 'CPU Usage' in the Unity Profiler, however I see the exact opposite. Specifically in my first post you can see the calls on the CPU that are taking the most time are all stemming from SkeletonAnimation.LateUpdate with over 55 ms used to LateUpdate the Skeleton's mesh.

Mario I'm not super familiar with Unity's renderer options, but my guess is whatever you selected might be too much for Android TV devices. These devices generally use SoCs with GPUs that are terrible when it comes to alpha blended overdraw and complex fragment shaders. If you're using a Unity renderer that uses a complex fragment shader internally, that might be what is causing the performance issues. What Unity version and renderer are you using?

We're not using HDRP/URP or anything like that, just the default renderer that Unity is packaged with for a 2D Mobile Project template. Specifically we are using Unity 2021.3.20f1 at the moment, one of currently supported and suggested versions for Unity. We have the Adaptive Performance package as well, but haven't done anything with that API yet. As far as I'm aware this should be one of the most lightweight setups for Unity rendering and Spine.

We also aren't doing any complex blending or anything like that on our Crowd nor our Player, and are just using the default Spine Shaders/Materials for those as well. On the opponent we are doing a slightly modified version of the Spine shader for outlines, but even with only the Player and Crowd instantiated we get about _ FPS (on a release build without profiling). The Crowd and Player do both have their slots colored programatically on their Awake calls, to allow for player customization and matching the crowd to the background colors, but this is only done once on Awake. We also did this same exact thing, on the same exact skeletons, in EYKO using Cocos2d-x, so it seems very unlikely that this could be the issue (especially since the bottleneck definitely appears to be in the CPU usage).

Edit: After profiling without Deep Profiling (as I had done for my very first post), I do indeed see the issue is likely GPU bound, though I'm struggling to see how Unity's renderer is so much less efficient than Cocos2d-x's OpenGL renderer. I know that Unity's renderer is heavy but I still assumed far better performance than this on TV. Removing the use of an outline (or custom rim-light shader) does actually get us about 10 extra FPS, from an unstable 20. However we are still not getting 60 FPS. But after removing that we are seeing around 30 FPS (though extremely unstable) with all three skeletons. The profiler now is indicating that it is indeed likely GPU bound since the biggest CPU call is now Gfx.WaitForPresentOnGfxThread which indicates that the CPU is waiting a while for the GPU to finish rendering. Why this might be the case I'm not sure, as without any Skeletons it easily manages to hit a stable 60 FPS as well with these scenes.

With the nature of our game we can't really afford to change the way the artists create these skeletons, and I don't really see much way to simplify our renderer or shaders much more than they already are to get better performance, unless there is a simplified Spine shader suitable for our use case on Mobile/TV devices.

Edit 2: I've opened a forum post here on the Unity Forums to hopefully get some opinions, suggestions, and recommendations from Unity-specific experts/developers.

Harald Could you please share a screenshot of your Project Settings - Player settings? You could have a try whether using the IL2CPP scripting backend improves the situation.

Certainly! (Sorry the image is so long, the spoiler tag doesn't shorten the empty space the image takes up on these forums, or I'd have hidden it in a spoiler.)

After setting our scripting backend to IL2CPP (which I thought I already did, but must've done only for iOS), as well as disabling the outline shader effect, we get... an unstable 30 FPS still with all three skeletons (though it might be more stable than without IL2CPP). Most of the time here is still being spent waiting for the GPU in the script as far as I can tell (Gfx.WaitForPresentOnGfxThread).

Some other testing has shown that using URP, with the default Spine URP Example 2D Scene from Spine, I only get about 15 FPS on the Android TV (while profiling), with most of the time being spent waiting for the GPU in the script (Gfx.WaitForPresentOnGfxThread).

After disabling all the point and directional lights in that scene I get around 57-59 FPS (while profiling) but with spikes down to 30 FPS, seemingly on a cyclical thing. Again these spikes seem to also be due to time being spent waiting for the GPU (Gfx.WaitForPresentOnGfxThread).

I'll report back here once I test all three skeletons rendering with URP next.

Edit: Welp. Trying URP with the three skeletons, Player, Opponent, and Crowd, is not boding well so far.

Using URP with the default Spine Skeleton shaders only gives us about 15 FPS now, whereas the default renderer with default shaders got us around 30 FPS (albeit unstably). Using URP with the Universal Render Pipeline/2D/Spine/Sprite shader gives us a whopping 6 FPS Then finally using URP with the Universal Render Pipeline/2D/Spine/SkeletonLit shader gives us 10 FPS. GPU Instancing doesn't seem to make a difference here either.

In all three of these tests there were no normal maps, emission maps, fragment shaders (outside of any you've used for your shaders in Spine's Unity Package), no light sources, etc. It was quite literally three skeletons, a camera, a global light 2d, and a single canvas with a single TextMeshPro on it to display the FPS averaged over the last 60 frames. About as simple of a scene as we could make for this test.

Misaki ExNull-Tyelor Sorry for the wait! Yesterday was a public holiday and Harald will be back today, so please wait a little longer for him.
Harald Sorry for the late reply!

Not a problem at all, and I apologize for trying to bother you all on your holiday!

Harald Here you are using a lit 2D shader (truncated, but likely Universal Render Pipeline/2D/Spine/Skeleton Lit). Please use an unlit non-2D shader if you don't need any lighting applied. Like Universal Render Pipeline/Spine/Skeleton.

Interestingly, changing the Skeleton's shaders to the one you suggested, Universal Render Pipeline/Spine/Skeleton, causes the Skeletons to stop rendering entirely.

Edit: Actually both the Universal Render Pipeline/Spine/Skeleton and Universal Render Pipeline/Spine/Skeleton Lit cause the Skeleton to stop rendering entirely, as does Universal Render Pipeline/Spine/Sprite. Though Universal Render Pipeline/Spine/Outline/Skeleton-OutlineOnly does render only the outline of the Skeleton. Only the Spine shaders under Universal Render Pipeline/2D/Spine/ are working (Skeleton Lit and Sprite) are actually rendering somewhat properly, but the Sprite shader creates outlines between all the symbols that aren't in the actual atlas file.

Harald While I don't think it will improve the situation, you could have a try changing Light Blend Styles entry Rim to Mask Texture Channel from R to None. I doubt that any unnecessary pass will be triggered if no lights are active at all, but just to be sure no unnecessary overhead is generated.

Doing this with the Lit Skeleton shaders doesn't seem to give any noticeable improvement in performance. Though I can't seem to use the un-lit shaders like you suggested above to see if there is a difference there...