The Unity Profiler native plug-inA set of code created outside of Unity that creates functionality in Unity. There are two kinds of plug-ins you can use in Unity: Managed plug-ins (managed .NET assemblies created with tools like Visual Studio) and Native plug-ins (platform-specific native code libraries). More info
See in Glossary enables you to extract data from Unity via script for analysis in an external tool, such as RazorA CPU/GPU chip set used in PS4 hardware. More info
See in Glossary (PS4), PIX (Xbox, Windows), Chrome Tracing, ETW, ITT, Vtune and Telemetry. The Unity ProfilerA window that helps you to optimize your game. It shows how much time is spent in the various areas of your game. For example, it can report the percentage of time spent rendering, animating or in your game logic. More info
See in Glossary records events, and the Profiler native plug-inA platform-specific native code library that is created outside of Unity for use in Unity. Allows you can access features like OS calls and third-party code libraries that would otherwise not be available to Unity. More info
See in Glossary API exposes these events to a third-party profiling API, which passes them to the relevant analysis tool.
The following Unity Profiler features help capture instrumentation data for performance analysis:
CategoriesA Profiler category identifies the workload data for a Unity subsystem (for example, Rendering, Scripting and Animation categories). Unity applies colour-coding to categories to help visually distinguish the types of data in the Profiler window. More info
See in Glossary: Unity groups profile data into categories (such as Rendering, Scripting and Animation), and assigns a color to each category. This helps you visually distinguish the types of data in the Profiler window. The Profiler native plug-in API enables you to retrieve these colors so you can use them in an external profiler.
Usage flags: The Unity Profiler applies the following usage flags to event markers to help filter the data:
Availability flags that describe whether a marker is available in the Unity Editor, or a Development or Release Player.
Verbosity levels that correlate to the type of the task you are doing in the Editor, and the level of information that task requires (for example, internal, debug, or user level).
Usage flags allow you to filter the data before you pass it to an external tool to reduce the amount of generated data, and filter the data in an external tool to reduce noise in the information.
Frame events: The Profiler native plug-in API enables you to do frame time analysis in an external profiler.
Thread profiling: Unity does a significant amount of work on threads (for example, the main thread, render thread and job system worker thread). You can use the Profiler native plug-in API to enable profiling on any thread.
The native Profiler plug-in API provides the interface between Unity’s subsystems and third-party profiling APIs. The API is exposed by the IUnityProfilerCallbacks header, which Unity stores in the <UnityInstallPath>\Editor\Data\PluginAPI folder of your Unity installation.
To use the instrumentation data that the Unity Profiler generates in an external profiler, use this minimal set of callbacks:
RegisterCreateCategoryCallback: Whenever Unity creates a category, the Profiler gets the category name and color, and registers this callback .
RegisterCreateMarkerCallback: Whenever Unity creates a marker, the Profiler gets the marker name, category and usage flags, and registers this callback. UnityProfilerMarkerDesc represents a persistent pointer which you can use to filter markers in RegisterMarkerEventCallback.
RegisterMarkerEventCallback: Tracks the external profiler push/pop markers with the Unity Profiler equivalents, and registers an event callback for the given marker. The Unity Profiler runs the specified callback when a scoped instrumentation event or a single-shot event occurs. You can also track memory allocation and garbage collection events as markers. Unity represents these events as GC.Alloc and GC.Collect respectively.
RegisterFrameCallback: Encapsulates samples into logical frames for use in external profilers that don’t have a concept of frames, and registers a callback that the Unity Profiler runs when Unity starts the next logical CPU frame.
RegisterCreateThreadCallback: Whenever Unity registers a thread for profiling, the Profiler gets the internal thread name, and registers this callback for that thread.
The following example shows you how to send begin and end events to an external profiler:
| #include <IUnityInterface.h>
#include <IUnityProfilerCallbacks.h><br/>
static IUnityProfilerCallbacks* s_UnityProfilerCallbacks = NULL;
static void UNITY_INTERFACE_API MyProfilerEventCallback(
const UnityProfilerMarkerDesc* markerDesc,
UnityProfilerMarkerEventType eventType,
unsigned short eventDataCount,
const UnityProfilerMarkerData* eventData, void* userData)
{
switch (eventType)
{
case kUnityProfilerMarkerEventTypeBegin:
{
MyProfilerPushMarker(markerDesc->name);
break;
}
case kUnityProfilerMarkerEventTypeEnd:
{
MyProfilerPopMarker(markerDesc->name);
break;
}
}
}
static void UNITY_INTERFACE_API MyProfilerCreateEventCallback(
const UnityProfilerMarkerDesc* markerDesc, void* userData)
{
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks->
RegisterEventCallback(markerDesc, MyProfilerEventCallback, NULL);
}
extern "C" void UNITY_INTERFACE_EXPORT UNITY_INTERFACE_API UnityPluginLoad(IUnityInterfaces* unityInterfaces)
{
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks = unityInterfaces->Get<IUnityProfilerCallbacks>();
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks->
RegisterCreateEventCallback(&MyProfilerCreateEventCallback, NULL);
}
extern "C" void UNITY_INTERFACE_EXPORT UNITY_INTERFACE_API UnityPluginUnload()
{
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks->
UnregisterCreateEventCallback(&MyProfilerCreateEventCallback, NULL);
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks->
UnregisterEventCallback(NULL, &MyProfilerEventCallback, NULL);
}
Note: To unregister the given callback from all markers, run UnregisterEventCallback with the first parameter set to NULL.
You can register and unregister marker callbacks dynamically, once every frame. The following example shows you how to minimize profiling overhead by enabling and disabling callbacks, depending on a third party profile state.
| static void UNITY_INTERFACE_API SystraceFrameCallback(void* userData)
{
bool isCapturing = ATrace_isEnabled();
if (isCapturing != s_isCapturing)
{
s_isCapturing = isCapturing;
if (isCapturing)
{
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks-><br/> RegisterCreateMarkerCallback(SystraceCreateEventCallback, NULL);
}
else
{
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks->
UnregisterCreateMarkerCallback(SystraceCreateEventCallback, NULL);
s_UnityProfilerCallbacks->
UnregisterMarkerEventCallback(NULL, SystraceEventCallback, NULL);
}
}
}
Note: To minimize callback overhead, you can register callbacks only for the duration of the capture.
The Systrace API provides the ATrace_isEnabled API, which determines whether capturing is enabled. You can check this on a per-frame basis to enable or disable callbacks dynamically. For a more advanced usage example, see the UnitySystracePlugin repository.
Unity has the following markers that contain useful metadata:
A marker that Unity reserves for Profiler.BeginSample and Profiler.EndSample events. kUnityProfilerMarkerEventTypeBegin eventType corresponds to the Profiler.BeginSample event and has the following data:
Int32: The UnityEngine.Object instance id or 0 if the object is not specified.
UInt16 array: The UTF16 string that is passed to Profiler.BeginSample. The size is in bytes.
UInt32: The category index.
A marker that corresponds to garbage collection allocation. It has the following data:
2019–02–14 Page published with editorial review
Low-level Profiler native plug-in added in Unity 2018.3 NewIn20183
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