I was wondering if there is any way to lower the amount of resources that Unity uses when its ostensibly not doing anything – such as sitting in a menu that isn’t animated. This is something that always annoys me in modern games, and I know it annoys others, that games sitting idle uses almost as many resources as it does while actually running.

In a low level application you could pause frame updates until a windows event triggers them, but this isn’t possible in Unity as the update loop is triggered internally.

You can set the target framerate to be low, but this makes the menu unresponsive when you click on something, even if you immediately scale the framerate back up when you do, and it doesn’t reduce the CPU usage much anyway.