Performance question

[rainbowcreatures]

Hey there, I'm completely new to Flutter, so I'm not sure if I might be missing something, but I did notice that when I launch my AR project inside Flutter on Android vs. standalone, the performance hit is quite visible. Mostly it's not just general fps drop, but kind of random stuttering, like the fps goes up and down quite a bit. It's not a pleasant experience compared to the standalone, which is completely smooth on my phone. It is not like 3fps / unusable but kind of on the edge of usability.

Is this kind of performance drop expected, or are there any hints to optimize it on the Flutter side? I tried building in release mode, hoping it would help, but I don't see any changes I could notice.

[timbotimbo]

There is always a slight performance drop, but I have yet to really profile this as it has always been good enough for my use.

You can try experimenting with the useAndroidViewSurface: parameter to see if it makes a notable difference. This changes the flutter platform view implementation between Virtual display (false) and Hybrid compostion (true), which have different performance trade-offs.
Although in my experience setting it to true introduces more bugs in the plugin (and is fully broken on android <= 7).

On another note, I've got 2 projects using ARFoundation in Unity 2021 with this plugin.

• One is using the standard pipeline and performance is fine.
• The second is using URP and you can clearly see stutter in the camera image on android.

Even by disabling all post processing and adjusting quality settings, I still can't get URP to perform equal to the standard pipeline. I still need to look into this some more to draw real conclusions though.

[rainbowcreatures]

Thanks for those hints! We're using the standard pipeline for this project (also Unity 2021 btw.). Will test more as we're developing further. I've been doing some tests later and for some reason the performance seemed better (but I've been testing indoors, instead of outdoors). As you said, I noticed a similar effect with the camera, like even when I looked away from the 3d objects...just looking through the camera was kind of stuttery and laggy. Not horrible, just noticable. And because there should have been minimal 3d load in that scenario, I was thinking it's the Flutter being busy on top of Unity. Anyway, I'll see if I can profile this, for now it's "usable" at least, I think :)

[BlickwinkelTour]

Hi, thanks for the insights!
For me, performance hits quite hard on an older Huawei M5 Tablet with Android 9. The newer Galaxy range is doing well, but performance drops are noticeable. Do you have general tips and good resources how to profile performance on Flutter and Unity?