Last week when trying an alpha build of SCRUM’ed on the university lab something caught my attention: even in the lowest quality setting, where pretty much everything gpu intensive is disabled, the framerate was still at unaceptable levels (think 5~8FPS).

That is just… unacceptable. SCRUM’ed is an educational game that yes, approaches the Scrum metodology in a slightly different way, but is still meant to be played on an university lab where the computers are not quite last-gen.

After a bunch of debugging, the culpripts: grass and water4. Just removed the grass texture from the terrain and switched to WaterProDaytime to witness a ~100FPS increase in the lowest quality setting.

Now I’m not saying that SCRUM’ed is overly optimized - it certainly isn’t - but that’s quite a bottleneck, specially considering that only Standard Assets where used and the terrain is not particularly large.

Terrain setting used

I’ve read some suggestions to use meshes instead of the default grass painting, but to be honest that does not sound very practical. Just plain removing the grass is not the best solution either… It would be great if Unity implemented some sort of graceful degradation for grass and water based on the quality settings.