Unity Power Optimization

Unity Power Optimization

When working with Unity, there are some optimizations that will help you get the best power performance out of the Magic Leap headset. Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) and Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) are the two options discussed in this guide.

Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA)

TAA is a rendering feature that helps improve the visual quality of images by smoothing out jagged edges and reducing aliasing artifacts. TAA samples each pixel only once per frame, but samples the pixels at different locations in different frames.

Please disable TAA if it is not required by your application.

Enabling TAA can come at the cost of reduced battery life. Please use the following table to help you find a balance between visual quality and energy efficiency for your application.

Unity Reference Application - Magic Leap Model Viewer (Oct 2023)

Metric	TAA Disabled	TAA Enabled
GPU Power	Baseline	Baseline + 128%
System Power	Baseline	Baseline + 18.9%

Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA)

MSAA is a rendering feature that helps improve the visual quality of images by smoothing out jagged edges and reducing aliasing artifacts. MSAA samples each pixel multiple times at different locations within the frame and averages the samples to produce the final pixel value.

Please select the lowest level of MSAA needed by the application.

Enabling MSAA and increasing the sample levels can come at the cost of reduced battery life. Please use the following table to help you find a balance between visual quality and energy efficiency for your app.

Unity Reference Application - Magic Leap Model Viewer (Oct 2023)

Metric	No MSAA	2x MSAA	4x MSAA
GPU Power	Baseline	Baseline + 22%	Baseline + 33%
System Power	Baseline	Baseline + 5.6%	Baseline + 8.3%

It is not recommended to use 8x MSAA as it can lead to substantial performance degradation, reducing the frame rate to as low as 13 frames per second (FPS)