Unity Why are the newer releases of Unity so laggy?

[Deleted member 4963437]

And it's not a hardware issue either. While my PC isn't the best of the best, it can still run Unity fine. It's just that, the newer releases of Unity (2020.x.x or 2021.x.x) have been SOOO laggy and I can't even make a click. I currently work with 5.6.2 (because I am modding Koikatsu) but I have been trying to extract assets from an Android unity game, and because of dependency issues I have to use a somewhat newer version.

I was thinking to do the 2019 releases, but I wanted something a bit newer. Except that the newest releases give me that stupid "Busy for (insert amount of time)" window and it takes too long to make a fucking PROJECT. It doesn't have to take this long! Releases like 5.6.2 make projects under 5 minutes! But I have to wait over 11 minutes to make a project. Wow, Unity.

But the real question is, why is it so laggy? Can I do anything to fix this lag?

 

[MissFortune]

I don't use Unity, but with more and more powerful hardware becoming affordable to those on the lower end of the economical classes, it isn't hard to see or think that the Unity team are allowing for more system resources to be used for better overall performance. Which is going to have the side effect of slowing down performance on lower-end systems. Again, just a complete guess on my part. Let someone else who actively uses Unity give you a sure answer.

That said, I'd imagine a RAM and/or a CPU upgrade may fix a lot of the UI lag. Probably the former, but I'd still imagine the GPU does a lot of the hard work with Unity. It very much does sound like a hardware-related problem, though.

 

[Deleted member 4963437]

I don't use Unity, but with more and more powerful hardware becoming affordable to those on the lower end of the economical classes, it isn't hard to see or think that the Unity team are allowing for more system resources to be used for better overall performance. Which is going to have the side effect of slowing down performance on lower-end systems. Again, just a complete guess on my part. Let someone else who actively uses Unity give you a sure answer.

That said, I'd imagine a RAM and/or a CPU upgrade may fix a lot of the UI lag. Probably the former, but I'd still imagine the GPU does a lot of the hard work with Unity. It very much does sound like a hardware-related problem, though.

Actually, now that you say it, it makes a lot of sense. I mean I've seen people wanting their CPU at 100% so then they could render a music project faster? But programs nowadays are taking up a lot of resources so things can render faster, but at the cost of.. lag. I've seen this same issue happening with even people who have higher end systems. I think Unity Technologies already knows this is happening and is trying to find a fix to it, but how to fix it. But no one knows why it's happening, so if no one knows why, there can't be a fix.

 

[eugeneloza]

Upgrading RAM 8Gb -> 40Gb fixed a similar issue for me when working with large projects. Unity quickly eats up a lot of memory. A temporary solution would be to close all other software except essential. A web browser is another memory black hole, easily eating up over 2Gb depending on the amount of tabs open. Note that you may have a ton of other stuff running in background (messengers, bloatware, etc.), it's a good idea to keep your Windows startup as clean as possible, check your memory usage in Task Manager to look for possible caveats.

Also don't delete Library folder unless you are getting weird unexpected bugs. Unity stores a lot of stuff there so that it will start the project faster next time. For a significantly large project rebuilding Library can take a very long time even on a powerful desktop, but it happens only once.

 

[Tompte]

I use Unity, both professionally and privately, but I can't really answer your question since I'm not familiar with the later versions of Unity, but I know at least this much...

Unity, as a company, is in competition with other game engines (Unreal, among others) and they have a vested interest to deliver the latest, fancies graphics and whatever ray-tracing mumbo jumbo is the latest fad of the day. Both to satisfy existing customers, attract new ones and to stay competitive. This means that with every new major version they add more "stuff" to it. More stuff means more work that the engine has to do. They also introduce minor changes to everything. All of these things come at a cost. Unity, being a managed C# based engine, was never the fastest to begin with anyway.

As a developer spending months and months making a game, you do not want to just upgrade your engine willy nilly unless you have a specific issue with your current version. You might think that it's important to keep the engine up to date but that is not true at all if you want your game to stay the way it is.

I'm still on Unity 2018 for this specific reason (guess what, it still works fine). I've already built my game on it and the worst thing I could do is to pull the rug out from under my game by changing the underlying engine. I've tried upgrading many times but there's always some issue that makes it not worth the hassle. Unless you want some specific feature or bug fix, you usually gain nothing by upgrading.

However, all that said, it could be that this specific version you're using has a regression bug in it and it may be something worth reporting. They usually try to make sure things don't get worse but they're not always successful. Could be a bug. It could also be a change that requires your attention (like a new setting needs to be turned off or something). Read the change logs.