Jamieh
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Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

11 Aug 2020, 17:23

Our app is rendering Noesis via Camera Overlay render mode in Unity. Is there a way to turn off continuous rendering for this mode? The tooltip says the "Continuous Rendering" flag is ignored for Camera Overlay mode, and I don't fully understand the NoesisView.NeedsRendering flag.

When we upgraded from Noesis 2.2.6 to Noesis 3, we had several customers complain about laptop overheating/battery drain, which I think is due to increased GPU load. I have since put in a target framerate of 30 FPS and that lowers the GPU load on my system by quite a bit. But our app is quite static--2D turn-based game with minimal animation. So we could easily only render "when needed" instead of at a constant 30 FPS.

Thanks!
 
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jsantos
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

12 Aug 2020, 10:49

Continuous rendering cannot be enabled when rendering to camera, because that render loop is controlled by Unity. I assume you also have 3D content behind the UI that you are also updating per frame, so you need to use the mechanisms provided by Unity to stop rendering continuously.

Or, you could use a render texture aligned to the camera.

By the way, Noesis 3 is much more efficient than 2.X, if you are observing a degradation of performance you should report it because that's probably a bug or unexpected path.
 
Jamieh
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

13 Aug 2020, 07:31

Our game is 100% 2D using Noesis. We don't have any 3D objects.

I think the increased efficiency of Noesis 3 may have been the issue. I was seeing it driving 80 FPS on my desktop. I think the attempt to maximize framerate was causing our WebGL customers problems. They were complaining of their laptops getting really hot and battery life just being completely shot.

Setting the target framerate to 30 FPS seems to have greatly improved things, I thought I had continuous rendering turned off Under Noesis 2, but maybe it wasn't actually doing anything. If there is a better way for us to be doing this, I'm definitely up for it.
 
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jsantos
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

17 Aug 2020, 10:55

If there is a better way for us to be doing this, I'm definitely up for it.
You could try rendering noesis into a texture aligned with the camera, that way you can disable continuous rendering. And also you need to find a way in Unit to stop rendering frames (in your case it is probably only doing a clear screen, if you have that disabled in you camera, that is probably enough). We have a few users doing something similar.
 
Jamieh
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

17 Aug 2020, 17:58

Thanks, I may try this. In the meantime, setting the Unity target framerate to 30 fps seems to have alleviated the performance and battery issues, so I think we'll run with that for now.
 
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ttermeer-reboundcg
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

21 Aug 2020, 16:54

We are observing similar issue on a low end laptop. Most of our game is 100% NoesisGUI - no Unity rendered object. I didn't take the complain seriously from my colleague but looks like it is a real issue.

I will look into rendering into a texture but I find it bizarre that is not the default behavior if you just need UI.
 
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jsantos
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

22 Aug 2020, 11:43

So after thinking more about this I think we should support "Continuous Rendering" also when rendering to camera. We didn't implement it because it can generate incorrect render, for example if you enable it and Unity is not preserving the content of the previous frame. So with this new implementation, if you configure Unity to preserve the content of the framebuffer between consecutive frames and you enable "Continuos Rendering" you will save a lot of battery.

What do you think about this?
 
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jsantos
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

22 Aug 2020, 11:48

Ticket for this feature #1781
 
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ttermeer-reboundcg
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

25 Aug 2020, 11:02

Sounds promising. Looking forward to it!
 
Jamieh
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Re: Turn off continuous rendering in Unity?

25 Aug 2020, 22:53

This sounds great. But I may have things mixed up--would we want to turn "Continuous Rendering" on or off to have better performance on something that is Noesis on a camera? I thought I wanted it off but I may misunderstand the terminology here. I would prefer rendering only when there is a Noesis change, instead of on every frame like it appears to be now.

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