6 replies to this topic

[Sean H.]

Simple question. In your experience, which engine in the devmaster engine list would you say gives the best performance?

I'm fully aware that the performance of any rendering application is highly dependent on the scene complexity, number of objects, number of lights, and non-rendering tasks. I also realize that simply downloading an engine and running a demo scene which is packaged with it doesnt necessarily represent the performance of the engine overall.

And that's exactly what I'm looking to get a handle on; overall engine performance. I'd like to try to get a general consensus on which engines are considered to have exceptional performance to help me put my own thoughts about engine performance into context.

thanks

[alphadog]

Well, to answer that truthfully and semi-accurately, one would have to implement a set of demo-like small games in multiple game engines, using the best possible practices, functionalities and coding techniques of each engine.

Needless to say, a huge undertaking.

(Not to mention willingness to be the the object of a copious f**k-ton of flaming by engine-specific zealots...)

[fireside]

You kind of answered your own question. There isn't any fair test to know which is faster and there are all kind of tricks to improve perceived performance, and some would be faster in some situations, others in other situations. Lastly, speed generally isn't a major consideration. It's features. What does it do?

[Sean H.]

one of the reasons I ask is because I've looked at alot of engines and I've browsed the forums for alot of engines. I swear it seems like users of almost every engine complain about the performance. Every engine from Unity to Torque has people claiming performance is one of their main gripes with the engine, especially compared to the performance of more expensive commercial engines.

I wanted to know if theres an engine around thats generally accepted as having the best performance overall.

[alphadog]

Inherent in the problem of building a general-purpose engine is the fact that you cannot be fastest at everything. Engines built for a specific type of game will be optimized for that game.

Also, I would imagine that most of the performance issues in forums are PEBKAC-type problems...

PS: Furthermore, trying to find a needle in this haystack is a case of "premature optimization". Do you even know that your game will have performance issues in engine X?

[fireside]

Quote

I swear it seems like users of almost every engine complain about the performance.

Most of these are amateur developers that don't know anything about optimizing. They have thousands of individual objects when they could have combined many of them into one. They aren't using level of detail, etc. and they could be doing all kinds of unnecessary tests every game loop in their scripts. The truth is, most of them aren't even writing games. They throw a lot of stuff into one scene until it basically drops down to 10 frames per second.
The first thing to consider is that, if you are a lone developer or a small team, you are probably considering a game that goes way past what you will be able to implement. It's very hard to populate a large world with anything meaningful. Those are games that game companies write.

[Sol_HSA]

As engine performance goes, I can tell you a little story.

I spent some time optimizing an engine back on dx7 days to push tons of polygons (although the count is pitiful to these days, but nevertheless). All of my test scenes consisted of few, but very complicated objects.

Then I gave the engine to the artists, and the first thing they do is use a lot of very simple objects.

As you may have guessed, the performance sucked.