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edited Feb 1, 2023 at 8:59

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I have optimised and shipped 6 mobile games in Unity and have never had to do any audio optimisations. (Except changing music tracks to be streaming instead of decompress on load, and tweaking audio import settings for load time/memory improvements)

I can almost guarantee that your performance problems will be elsewhere, and worrying about something like audio with no indications that it's going to be a performance issue is likely going to distract your attention from other things that are more likely to be performance issues, eg scripts, garbage collection, draw calls, shaders, etc.

However, I would consider if positional audio is even a good idea for a mobile game. Many players may mute sound entirely. Does knowing where a sound comes from actually help the game, or does it just make the audio harder to distinguish?

I would say that using 2D vs 3D audio will make basically no difference, it's unlikely Unity would have some kind of check to skip some processing if an audio source is only 2D, as the savings would be extremely miniscule. (A distance check to calculate volume falloff is very simple and easily optimizable and cache-able, so it's likely highly optimised by Unity/Fmod anyway)

I have optimised and shipped 6 mobile games in Unity and have never had to do any audio optimisations. I can almost guarantee that your performance problems will be elsewhere, and worrying about something like audio with no indications that it's going to be a performance issue is likely going to distract your attention from other things that are more likely to be performance issues, eg scripts, garbage collection, draw calls, shaders, etc.

However, I would consider if positional audio is even a good idea for a mobile game. Many players may mute sound entirely. Does knowing where a sound comes from actually help the game, or does it just make the audio harder to distinguish?

I would say that using 2D vs 3D audio will make basically no difference, it's unlikely Unity would have some kind of check to skip some processing if an audio source is only 2D, as the savings would be extremely miniscule. (A distance check to calculate volume falloff is very simple and easily optimizable and cache-able, so it's likely highly optimised by Unity/Fmod anyway)

I have optimised and shipped 6 mobile games in Unity and have never had to do any audio optimisations. (Except changing music tracks to be streaming instead of decompress on load, and tweaking audio import settings for load time/memory improvements)

I can almost guarantee that your performance problems will be elsewhere, and worrying about something like audio with no indications that it's going to be a performance issue is likely going to distract your attention from other things that are more likely to be performance issues, eg scripts, garbage collection, draw calls, shaders, etc.

However, I would consider if positional audio is even a good idea for a mobile game. Many players may mute sound entirely. Does knowing where a sound comes from actually help the game, or does it just make the audio harder to distinguish?

I would say that using 2D vs 3D audio will make basically no difference, it's unlikely Unity would have some kind of check to skip some processing if an audio source is only 2D, as the savings would be extremely miniscule. (A distance check to calculate volume falloff is very simple and easily optimizable and cache-able, so it's likely highly optimised by Unity/Fmod anyway)

answered Feb 1, 2023 at 8:58

71
2

I have optimised and shipped 6 mobile games in Unity and have never had to do any audio optimisations. I can almost guarantee that your performance problems will be elsewhere, and worrying about something like audio with no indications that it's going to be a performance issue is likely going to distract your attention from other things that are more likely to be performance issues, eg scripts, garbage collection, draw calls, shaders, etc.

However, I would consider if positional audio is even a good idea for a mobile game. Many players may mute sound entirely. Does knowing where a sound comes from actually help the game, or does it just make the audio harder to distinguish?

I would say that using 2D vs 3D audio will make basically no difference, it's unlikely Unity would have some kind of check to skip some processing if an audio source is only 2D, as the savings would be extremely miniscule. (A distance check to calculate volume falloff is very simple and easily optimizable and cache-able, so it's likely highly optimised by Unity/Fmod anyway)