Benchmarks

Hi all,

I know its very difficult to get realistic benchmarks but I just wondered if anyone had any kind of figures as to how well Unity performs etc compared to other 3d engines?

It certainly wins hands down on user freindlyness :smile:

Do you mean performance of a finished standalone on X hardware, performance/workflow/accessibility of the Unity environment (which will be highly subjective, of course), or some combination of both?

Well im thinking OTEE must have done some kind of benchmark tests whilst creating Unity in terms of Frames per second to render so many thousands of polygons??

Like I said I know its very subjective - but as Unity is pitching itself as a system that less experienced programmers can use one would expect the graphical performance to be very good to make of for the fact that the developers may not know all the tricks in the book when it comes to optimizing things.

For example I want to work on a game that will have very large outside terrains. Normally one would use some kind of LOD algorithm to improve the speed of rendering the terrain - but as Unity provides no easy way to manipulate meshes Iā€™m currently just loading in one very large mesh. To create a bigger terrain I am going to have to instantiate several copies of the mesh to patch together. Suddenly thats lot of polygons. Could Unity cope?

I realise the answer Iā€™m going to get is ā€œjust try it and seeā€ but it would be nice to know if OTEE could give some indication to Unityā€™s graphical performance.

well i donā€™t have hard stats but i was fooling around with one of the demo projects. i plopped in a 50k poly tree, a 20k poly bush and a 13k poly human. thatā€™s on top of the other stuff that was in the level (maybe 100k polys in total?). editing had no slow down at all. in game with everything in view my machine bottomed at around 10 fps but my machine is old:
quicksilver g4
733mhz
1gb ram
32mb geforce2

hope that helped and i wish i had a dual g5 with an 800xt!

Iā€™ve asked Nicholas whoā€™s our GFX guru to do a write-up on this.

In the meantime you can try out GooBall at various quality seetings. It should give you a decent idea of what you can easily do (although we did some optimizations since.)

d.

hey duh! yeah gooball runs fine on my machine on any quality setting. i bet it dumps any stuff my mac canā€™t handle on highest quality - but it still looks great and runs smoothā€¦

First of all, Unity uses all OpenGL extensions to maximize performance. Even those weird 10.2 ones that are a pain to work with.

That being said, a couple of things factor in:

  • Lighting quality - If you have 5 perpixel lights, you will get a huge performance hit. (unless you use a vertexlit shader :wink:
  • Object count matters a lot. Use few objects with a large polycount. anything below 1000 polys will be the same cost. Again, depends on the end user card, but thatā€™s the rule of thumb.

For terrains, Iā€™ve had good success with using Bryce to generate a, say, 40000 polygon mesh and then chopping that up in a 4x4 grid.

If you want to do larger worlds, just keep expanding that.

Unity currently does have some issues with larger worlds with many, many objects. Nothing you canā€™t overcome with some scripting - but not yet quite as smooth as weā€™d like.

That is one of the reasons that the game weā€™re developing as The Next Game aims to model a modern city mid-eastern with people walking about, garbage, street-sellers, cars, etcā€¦

One thing is sure though: If you work with Unity rather than against it, you can outperform anything on the Mac. And ship it as well :wink: