That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.
Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.
Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.
Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines.
Some studios are able to use these major engines very well, others not so much. It seems like there is a level of expertise needed to make well-oiled games.
On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.
Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.
…Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it’s Crytek.
Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.
There’s a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a ‘communal’ engine, polish, bugfixing and such.
Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.
I’m so sick of bad performance from all the big engines these days. Even unity makes simple 2d games chug.
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.
Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.
Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.
Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.
Some studios are able to use these major engines very well, others not so much. It seems like there is a level of expertise needed to make well-oiled games.
On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.
Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.
…Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it’s Crytek.
Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.
There’s a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a ‘communal’ engine, polish, bugfixing and such.
Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.