The Unity Profiler Window helps you to optimize your game. It reports for you how much time is spent in the various areas of your game. For example, it can report the percentage of time spent renderingThe process of drawing graphics to the screen (or to a render texture). By default, the main camera in Unity renders its view to the screen. More info
See in Glossary, animating or in your game logic.
You can analyze the performance of the GPU, CPU, memory, rendering, and audio.
To see the profiling data, you play your game in the Editor with Profiling on, and it records performance data. The Profiler window then displays the data in a timelineGeneric term within Unity that refers to all features, windows, editors, and components related to creating, modifying, or reusing cut-scenes, cinematics, and game-play sequences. More info
See in Glossary, so you can see the frames or areas that spike (take more time) than others. By clicking anywhere in the timeline, the bottom section of the Profiler window will display detailed information for the selected frame.
Note that profiling has to instrument your code (that is; add some instructions to facilitate the check). While this has a small impact on the performance of your game, the overhead is small enough to not affect the game framerate.
When using the profiling tool, focus on those parts of the game that consume the most time. Compare profiling results before and after code changes and determine the improvements you measure. Sometimes changes you make to improve performance might have a negative effect on frame rate; there may be unexpected consequences of your code optimization.
See Profiler window documentation for details of the Profiler window.
See also: Optimizing Graphics Performance.