If I correctly understand,

this only affects Unity Play Mode (i.e. running from the Editor), but not the on-device deployed app.

Is that correct ?

No, the issue is actually on the device - the Editor simply outputs the associated warning, indicating that there is a problem in the rendering pipeline that causes potentially (and unnecessarily) singificant performance drops on tiled deferrend rendering GPU Architectures (all iOS devices use such a GPU architecture!). From my own experience, the issue can be resolved quite easily by discarding the buffer before rendering into it a second time (but we can't solve this since it happens inside vuforia).

This is a bit weird;

at first you said "When running Vuforia for Unity in the Editor";

and the screenshot you attached shows a console message which is logged by the Unity Editor; but this cannot come from the device (device logs are only available via XCode, they are not visible in the Unity console... unless I miss something here).

Yes, the warning is shown when running in the Editor - but the Intent of this particular warning is to indicate that there is an issue in the rendering that affects performance negatively when running on the device

Hi,

Could you please supply a repro project, ideally one that is based on the Vuforia samples so that we can more fully investigate.

Then PM me a link so I can download.

cheers,

N

Hi,

I have experimented the same issue with almost every project, in my case the issue trigger is the realTime Shadows, when I turn off the shadows, the warning is not shown.

The fact that the only way to see the warning is running the project in the editor, doesn't mean that the problem will disappear when the application runs on device, in fact a very notable drop in performance running on device is evident when the warning is shown in the editor, well, finally this is the reason for these warnings, is in't ?

The problem persists in the new 2.8.9 vuforia version unity extension in Unity 4.3.4f1 Standard

The warning is pretty clear:

Tiled GPU perf. warning: RenderTexture color surface  (0x0) was not cleared/discarded, doing <run with profiler for info>

It is a buffer that is not cleared or discarted, in the following demo project I have reproduced the issue, it's a very simple project with just 2 meshes and one directional light, using the chips&stones marker.

If you run the project on the editor with hard light's shadows active, you can see the warning, if you turn off the shadows the message no longer appears.

The link to download the project:

http://www.3dlogical.net/temp/vuforia/GPU_warning_test.zip

Screenshot:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rwpfttj1yc0593d/Screenshot%202014-05-23%2010.23.17.png

Thanks a lot for your help

A similar issue is discussed here:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/191906-4-2-Any-way-to-turn-off-the-quot-Tiled-GPU-perf-warning-quot

this seems to be related to some heavy use of Textures or render buffers;  the threads above also mentions the use of multiple cameras as one typical reason for this (in case you are using more cameras, in addition to the AR Camera)...

obviously Vuforia makes some relevant use of Texture memory in order to render the video background; in particular, if the device has a camera / screen with very high resolution, the video background texture may be fairly large in terms of memory size;   this can consume some GPU resources (e.g. texture memory in particular), and if your app also has some advanced graphics effects (e.g. shadows) or additional cameras, etc.. this may result in some resource contention...  but I would not consider this a bug..... rather a resource contention issue, given that mobile GPUs have certain limitations.

Note that the same warning can be produced in a huge variety of situations, even when not using Vuforia.