Unity performance: change sprite from array or sprite sheet animation?

Question

Quite some time ago I made a "GIF player" that basically reads a sprite array and swaps the sprite using a Coroutine, one after the other, in order to imitate a "GIF" animation.

I was working but I have no clue about performance as on my PC it was fine.

Thing is, the game is meant for mobile and I experience some lag and I don't know if it is due to my not using sprite sheet animations instead of my shiny solution.

The question is: Is there some difference between the sprite sheet anim and swapping sprites from an array? I know Unity's API (that I used) cannot be called from other than the main thread. What about sprite sheet animations? Using another thread would definitely help but I can't do that and maybe they could.

Answer 1

It could be due to a lot of reasons. Most of them maybe aren't even related to that..?

But, about performance, using a spritesheet should always be better than manually swaping sprites.

The probably best solution would be to use a custom shader which makes use of a Texture2DArray to play the animation. But that is quite harder than making a spritesheet.

Answer 2

I'd just like to add that you can view relevant performance stats, like draw calls, by selecting stats under the game tab in the Unity editor.

A sprite sheet is generally useful for reducing draw calls as the entire sheet can be pushed to the graphics card instead of each sprite individually (a costly operation). Have a search for "unity sprite sheet draw calls".