Is it reasonable to use OnBecameVisible for controlling animations, lights and particle systems?

Hi everybody,

I want to reduce performance overhead in my game. From the docs I've learned about using OnBecameVisible and OnBecameInvisible for enabling/disabling scripted behaviour depending on visibility.

In the examples, these functions are used to enable/disable whole scripts, e.g. like this:

 function OnBecameVisible()
 {
   enabled = true;
 }
 
 function OnBecameInvisible()
 {
   enabled = false;
 }
 
 

This sounds quite clear and reasonable to me.

However, the most performance consuming parts of my game objects are not the scripts, but rather

• animations

• lights

• particle emitters

So I've scripted my OnBecameVisible/OnBecameInvisible methods in a way that they enable/disable these components (which seems to work fine).

My question however is: Does this make sense? Is it necessary at all? Or does the game engine optimize the rendering of such components by itself in a way that invisible animations etc. are suspended automatically whenever no camera can see them? Am I doing something completely redundant here?

I found some discussion about animations here: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/48683/Animations--Animate-only-when-visible.html. But this seems to relate to an older Unity version, because in my Animation component, there doesn't seem to be an option called "Animate only if visible" anymore. Instead, we now have the "culling type" option, but according to my understanding of the documentation (Animation Reference) this seems to be meant for something different.

Thanks for any hints!