Trade-offs in Performance and Optimization Techniques in Unity 3D to Achieve Realism

As games grow in complexity, their performance drops. This creates the challenge of optimizing performance without sacrificing quality. A challenge many developers face. This paper explores the optimization techniques in Unity, a game engine widely used in the gaming and film industries. Addressing the challenges of balancing performance, complexity, and quality, developers utilize optimization techniques like Static Batching, GPU Instancing, Occlusion Culling, Mesh Optimization. and Light Raking, each with different trade-offs. This paper analyzes the impact of each of these techniques on hardware performance, focusing on Static Batching's reduction in draw calls, GPU Instancing's ability to offload computation, Occlusion Culling's role in reducing rendered vertices and tri-angles, Mesh Optimization's effects on frame rates and memory usage, and Light Baking's potential to improve realism and performance with some limitations like static lighting and file size increase. Applying these techniques to a game developed for this study, The Forest Explorer shows a notable performance gain. Triangles and vertex count were reduced, leading to better frame rates and memory efficiency. Lowered CPU and GPU usage due to light baking. Reduction in the geometry complexity due to mesh optimization. The paper concludes that employing these optimization techniques enables developers to strike a desired balance between performance and user experience quality in Unity-based projects.