When is there a performance advantage to multiple banks in Unity?

In which case(s) are there performance advantages to using multiple banks in Unity? By default I understand that Unityloads the metadata for all banks at startup, but no sample data. This would be a pretty quick operation I’d think. If events in the game are set to stream from disk by default, then no sample data has to be loaded later either, so is loading/unloading multiple banks through scripting at all beneficial in a scenario with no sample data (a hypothetical that might not occur much in the real world)?

I’m assuming that using sample data, rather than streaming data, would change this and loading/unloading banks provides memory savings. In other words, if you’ve got significant sample data being loaded, this is when dividing up events into multiple banks becomes worth-while…

You are spot on.

Using more, smaller banks is more of a benefit when loading banks with sample data to memory.

There is a trade off when deciding to use streaming or sample data, streaming uses less resources while sample data is much fast and reliable.

https://fmod.com/resources/documentation-api?version=2.0&page=white-papers-studio-banks.html

1 Like