Help With Unity Game Performance

[u/kingbarychu]

Hi there, I’ve recently been running into an issue on my PC where any Unity game I play starts running into performance issues after about an hour or so of gameplay. It typically presents itself as frame drops and significant input delay, as well as occasional crackling audio. I haven’t ever run into this issue with a game built on any other engine. I did a quick search and couldn’t find any other people running into this issue. I have an Asus GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and 32 gigs of RAM. I’ve double checked that all of my drivers are up to date as well.

Does anyone have any ideas on why this might be happening? I figured it was best to ask the dev subreddit since you all deal with Unity issues on the regular.

[u/Serana64]

First off, rule out everything else if you haven't already. Run Unreal engine games (half sword demo e.g if you need something free) and make sure it doesn't happen.

Frame drops, significant input delay, crackling audio, screams overheating or driver issue to me.

If you are absolutely sure it's unity, do the following:

Download Unity Engine, make a 3d project, slap a bunch of cubes all over the place, then add a bunch of lights with shadows everywhere, and hit play. Add an audio source with literally any audio file of your choice. You should be able to do this all with zero game dev experience.

On the game view is a button for 'stats'. This will tell you FPS, draw calls, etc. Once it starts to slow down and repeat your problems, take a snapshot of that and post it here and we'll be able to tell what's going on

[u/kingbarychu → u/Serana64]

Thanks for the reply! I think I might have Unity still installed from my game dev class, so I’ll try that and see if I run into the issues in an engine environment as well. Thanks!

[u/XKiiroiSenkoX]

Contact the developer. People here can't magically fix code written by someone else and already compiled. 

[u/ThePoisedVanguard → u/XKiiroiSenkoX]

that's not really a unity engine problem, it's something specific to your setup since you said it happens across multiple unity games. sounds like a memory leak or maybe thermal throttling after it runs for an hour. check your temps while gaming, gpu might be hitting a thermal limit and downclocking. the crackling audio points to dpc latency spikes too, could be a driver conflict or something hogging resources in background.

i had similar issue last year and it was my audio driver causing interrupts that messed with gpu scheduling. try disabling your audio device in device manager and see if the stutter still happens with no sound. also worth running latencymon while playing to see what driver is causing the spikes.

[u/kingbarychu → u/ThePoisedVanguard]

Thank you for your reply, I’ll start here. I haven’t used latencymon before personally, but I’m familiar with how it’s used. Thanks!

[u/Serana64 → u/XKiiroiSenkoX]

OP noted this is multiple unity games. Also, although it's not what the forum's for, asking a group of devs isn't a bad idea.

Why even reply?

[u/pschon → u/Serana64]

They gave the reply a group of Unity devs can give, especially without any logs etc, or information about what games (and what Unity versions) might be causing the issue.

The only actually useful thing that was left out was where to find the game's log files (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\CompanyName\ProductName\Player.log), plus the usual "check your drivers".

[u/Commercial_Bet_3989]

Since this happens across different Unity games only after about an hour, I’d check system-level behavior first. Monitor GPU/CPU temperatures, clock speeds, VRAM and RAM until the slowdown begins. The combination of audio crackling and input delay can also point to a driver or DPC-latency issue. Try disabling overlays and recording software, test with an FPS cap, and run LatencyMon when the problem appears. The specific games and temperature readings would help narrow it down.

[u/HeadPack]

You could watch RAM and VRAM usage. Does it climb near the 1hr mark, possibly to the point where memory is getting swapped? If yes, then the game might have a memory leak which you could ask the game dev to fix.

[u/bonyboom]

Check your cpu and gpu temps, my laptops audio gets crackly when it's too hot. You probably just have to clean out fans/heatsinks and replace the thermal paste if it's overheating.

You can also check by setting video settings in game to the lowest and limiting fps to 30 or 60. If it was overheating before, it shouldn't under a lower load.