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Impossible Robert — Unity Tools

Plan for Performance

Text Studio is built to stay fast, but styled text still costs CPU time when it changes and GPU time when it is drawn. A few choices decide most of that cost: how rich the styles of repeated labels are, how many composited titles are on screen, how often text changes, and how the render pipeline is set up. The guidance below comes from measurements with the Text Studio Performance Lab on desktop PCs, Quest 3 and a mid-range Android tablet.

Know Where the Time Goes

  • Settled text is almost free: when text stops changing and animating, Text Studio stops updating it until something changes again.
  • Changing text costs main-thread time, because Text Studio reads the markup, lays out the text and uploads new geometry.
  • Animated effects cost a little every frame, in proportion to the letters they animate.
  • Styles cost GPU time for every pixel they cover. More layers, larger text and richer paints cost more.

Keep Repeated Labels Simple

Damage numbers, nameplates, list items and other labels that appear many times at once decide most of the GPU cost on phones and tablets.

  • Use a solid fill, a round outline and a Distance Field outer shadow, and set the style's Source Field Quality to Native in its Rendering section instead of the default Automatic. Such a style draws through the text's own TextMeshPro material and costs as much as TextMeshPro's outline and underlay.
  • Turn on Exact Layering in the style's Rendering section only for styles that need Text Studio's exact layer order; those styles then draw with Text Studio's own programs.
  • Keep gradients, textures, noise, bevels and other material layers for headings and highlights. On a mid-range mobile GPU, every layer of a rich style can cost several times as much as a whole simple label, while layers in solid colors cost far less.
  • Give labels that look alike the same style and font so that they batch together.

Use Composited Titles Deliberately

Styles with glows, blurs, echoes and other effects that reach beyond the letters render the text offscreen first and then compose it. They make the most striking titles and are also the most expensive text to draw.

  • Prefer one composited title on screen over many composited labels.
  • Set the Quality Tier in each layer's Advanced group to Balanced, the default, or Responsive on phones and tablets, and keep Hero for the largest showcase titles. A composited title renders at the highest Quality Tier among its layers, and Hero renders about five times the pixels of Balanced.
  • A title that does not animate renders once and is then reused. In an animated title, Text Studio can reuse a cached image of the layers that do not change and redraw only the moving parts, so keep animation on the layers that need it.
  • Test titles at the size they are shown: their cost grows with the area they cover on screen.

Keep Changing Text Cheap

  • Use SetTextDeferred for values that can change several times in one frame, such as counters and timers. Text Studio then updates once before the frame is drawn.
  • Use AppendText or AppendTextDeferred to add lines to chat logs, consoles and other logs instead of setting the whole text again. When the text is top-aligned with left, center or right alignment and its settings stay the same, Text Studio keeps the earlier lines and only prepares the new ones.
  • Avoid changing text, colors or styles every frame when nothing visible changes: text that changes every frame never settles.
  • For temporary text such as damage numbers, prewarm the emitter during loading so that the first numbers on screen do not allocate.

Set Up the Render Pipeline for Mobile

Check the render pipeline before the text. On a Galaxy Tab S7 FE at 2560 x 1600, a URP asset with HDR, 4x MSAA and the camera opaque texture took about 25 ms of GPU time per frame before any text was drawn, and about 4 ms with them turned off (Text Studio Performance Lab, October 2026).

  • Turn off HDR, MSAA and the opaque and depth textures in the mobile URP asset unless the game needs them.
  • Compare the frame time of an empty scene with your scene, so that you know how much of the frame the text really uses.

Prepare Fonts for Large Text

If the Inspector reports that a font field provides fewer pixels per em than the output needs, prepare Appearance Data for that font and the text, or choose Native quality to accept the font's own resolution. Prepared data keeps large titles sharp.

Measure on the Target Device

  • Measure in a release build on the device you ship to. The editor and development builds change the CPU cost.
  • Look at GPU time as well as main-thread time. On phones and tablets, the GPU usually limits styled text first.
  • Let the device run for a minute before you compare numbers, because heat lowers the clock speed of phones and tablets.
  • In the editor and in development builds, the Unity Profiler shows Text Studio's main-thread work under markers whose names start with Text Studio, such as Text Studio Pipeline, Text Studio Layout and Text Studio Present.
  • The first player build compiles Text Studio's specialized shader variants and takes longer; later builds reuse Unity's shader cache.
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