Multiple Particle Systems Performance

Question

Does anyone have info regarding the performance impact of a large number of particle systems? Say 300-500 at once.

Note that each individual system produces a particle infrequently. They make a 2-second-lifetime particle once every 0.01 seconds, so for 500 particle systems that's about 10 particles active at a time. I'm just worried about all these particle systems active at once.

Answer 1

By modern mobile standard, 500 particles in the same screen isn't a huge deal if the particles are relatively small and short-lived. Besides particle count, the performance impact by particles is affected by other factors:

How much portion of the screen is occupied by transparent particles which create severe transparency overdraw? The bigger the greater impact. Opaque material is slightly better than transparent.
Are drawcalls of particles emitted by different particle systems batched? This can be helped by using a particle texture atlas material and select the required tile in PS' Texture Sheet Animation module, if they share the same shader.
Does the particle system perform culling? Many settings in PS would break the culling, e.g. World simulation space, emission rate over distance, randomized force over lifetime, enabling noise/collision modules, etc.
How many times the PS prefab is instantiated? If possible, just Stop(), update object position and Play() again the frequently used PS instead of instantiating and destroying the same prefab over and over.

Multiple Particle Systems Performance

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