Optimizing Mobile Game Performance: A Practical Checklist
Keep your mobile game at a smooth frame rate and low battery drain with this checklist for draw calls, textures, memory, physics and profiling.
Phones throttle when they get hot, and players uninstall games that stutter. Use this checklist to find and fix the most common performance problems.
Profile first
Never guess. Profile on a real, mid-range device, not only in the editor. Look for spikes in CPU time, GPU time and garbage collection.
Rendering
- Batch draw calls. Share materials and use texture atlases.
- Compress textures with ASTC or ETC2 and use mipmaps for 3D.
- Avoid overdraw. Large transparent particles and full-screen UI layers are expensive.
- Bake lighting wherever you can instead of using real-time shadows.
CPU and memory
- Pool objects such as bullets and enemies instead of creating and destroying them.
- Avoid allocations in update loops. They trigger garbage collection pauses.
- Reduce physics cost with simple colliders and a lower fixed timestep.
Battery and heat
- Target 30 FPS for slower-paced games and 60 FPS for action games.
- Lower the frame rate on menus and pause screens.
- Render at a lower resolution and scale up on very high-DPI screens.
Loading and size
- Stream or lazy-load levels.
- Strip unused assets and code.
- Keep the install size small. Smaller downloads convert better on app stores.