Quality Settings

Unity allows you to set the level of graphical quality it will attempt to render. Generally speaking, quality comes at the expense of framerate and so it may be best not to aim for the highest quality on mobile devices or older hardware since it will have a detrimental effect on gameplay. The Quality Settings inspector (menu: Edit > Project Settings > Quality) is used to select the quality level in the editor for the chosen device. It is split into two main areas - at the top, there is the following matrix:

Unity lets you assign a name to a given combination of quality options for easy reference. The rows of the matrix let you choose which of the different platforms each quality level will apply to. The Default row at the bottom of the matrix is not a quality level in itself but rather sets the default quality level used for each platform (a green checkbox in a column denotes the level currently chosen for that platform). Unity comes with six quality levels pre-enabled but you can add your own levels using the button below the matrix. You can use the trashcan icon (the rightmost column) to delete an unwanted quality level.

You can click on the name of a quality level to select it for editing, which is done in the panel below the settings matrix:

The quality options you can choose for a quality level are as follows:

Rendering:

Shadows:

Other:

MaximumLOD level

Models which have a LOD below the MaximumLOD level will not be used and omitted from the build (which will save storage and memory space). Unity will use the smallest LOD value from all the MaximumLOD values linked with the quality settings for the target platform. If an LOD level is included then models from that LODGroup will be included in the build and always loaded at runtime for that LODGroup, regardless of the quality setting being used. As an example, if LOD level 0 is used in any quality setting then all the LOD levels will be included in the build and all the referenced models loaded at runtime.

Tearing

The picture on the display device is not continuously updated but rather the updates happen at regular intervals much like frame updates in Unity. However, Unity’s updates are not necessarily synchronised with those of the display, so it is possible for Unity to issue a new frame while the display is still rendering the previous one. This will result in a visual artifact called “tearing” at the position onscreen where the frame change occurs.

It is possible to set Unity to switch frames only during the period where the display device is not updating, the so-called “vertical blank”. The VSync option on the Quality Settings synchronises frame switches with the device’s vertical blank or optionally with every other vertical blank. The latter may be useful if the game requires more than one device update to complete the rendering of a frame.

Anti-aliasing

Anti aliasing improves the appearance of polygon edges, so they are not “jagged”, but smoothed out on the screen. However, it incurs a performance cost for the graphics card and uses more video memory (there’s no cost on the CPU though). The level of anti-aliasing determines how smooth polygon edges are (and how much video memory does it consume).

However, built-in hardware anti-aliasing does not work with Deferred Shading or HDR rendering; for these cases you’ll need to use Antialiasing Image Effect.

Soft Particles

Soft Particles fade out near intersections with other scene geometry. This looks much nicer, however it’s more expensive to compute (more complex pixel shaders), and only works on platforms that support depth textures. Furthermore, you have to use Deferred Shading or Legacy Deferred Lighting rendering path, or make the camera render depth textures from scripts.