How far away is Unity from e.g. Unreal and why?

Unity Engine
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Hi there,
I’m using Unity now for a while and took a look at Unreal in the last days and I asked myself:

Why is Unity still so far away from Unreal in graphics?

Yes, Unity shows us Adam, again and again and again, but I believe that the most people here can’t reproduce something like Adam and as you can see the Adam demo only works on DX11.

On Unreal you can do things like Adam out of the box (AAA-Gfx) on PC and Mac.

Unreal already announced Metal v2 support in Q3/2017. Unity… on Metal 1… beta (Editor) and no native CompuShader as I can see yet (?)

Don’t miss understand me. I really like Unity, because Unreal-Editor is slow and turns my computer into a stove while compiling, which is slow too, but in graphic-stuff it’s miles ahead. Editor shows me directly what I’ll get, simulates the platforms visually and much more realistic look out of the box.

So UnityTech, you are much much bigger as Epic and you earn a lot of money every month, but there are no words on your roadmap.

Yes, things like Teams are great, but much more important would be to get done the basic-stuff of a good game-engine and that would be the graphic-stuff. In my option.

UnityTech tells everywhere that the do their best to support new plattforms/technologies as soon as possible. It’s 2017, Metal 2 comes alive in a few weeks and the UnityEditor still doesn’t support Metal for real (yes, there are beta-support and it looks like beta…).

Does a Mac-Developer really needs to switch to a Windows-PC to develop games for a console? Yes, I need a Windows-PC to test and push it to a console, but this I could do on a Mac with a VirtualMachine, if Unity would be able to render all shaders (which are used on a console) within Unity on a Mac via Metal/Metal v2.

But it can’t…

So tell us please: When will UnityEngine be (really) ready for AAA-Games? And when will you integrate technologies that are really needed for development like Metal / Metal 2 / Metal Tessalation, Metal CompuShader, …?

Here’s just a very poor demo of what I mean:

Look at this… you can done this in Unreal so fast, but whatever you do in Unity 2001.1 it wouldn’t be look like that - in no way.

Or look at this graphic comparison:

So hopefully someone from UnityTech can tell something about this.

Thank you.

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Ok, thank you. I watched them, but no single word about anything around Metal, Metal v2, ComputeShader on Mac.

It’s technical possible to get graphics like in the Adam demo on a Mac, but Unity still doesn’t give support to it.

So why? Metal is there. Metal 2 comes, but it looks like nothing happens there.

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So maybe I’m wrong but what’s needed is Shader Model 5 with/in/on Metal 2 in Unity, right?

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Mostly because they don’t have a big team behind them.

You could probably adapt all the shaders, etc to non-DX APIs.

Well… could you? Graphics alone doesn’t make a good game. Most important is how good your Assets (Models, Textures… you name it) are.

P.A.M.E.L.A looks good. Escape From Tarkov doesn’t look bad either. Both games run on Unity.

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Just look at the Forest-Video above… this a one person demo… in just 1 hour. And it has much better graphic on PC and Mac.

Don’t misunderstand me please. I love Unity, but I can’t understand why these important things are missing (specially much better macOS/iOS Metal-Support) and generally better rendering.

I mean a lot of years ago Unity was a Mac only product and today it feels like Windows-First is the new concept since some big “deals” between UnityTech and Microsoft in the background.

Maybe this is a reason why Apple chooses EpicGames for TechDemo on Metal iOS (ZenGarden) and this year for VR.

I really really hope UnityTech realizes what Metal2 means for the Mac (this is the first time Apple opens the Mac for real gaming in my opinion).

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People ask this all the time.

The answer is content. Create amazing content, set it up correctly in either engine, and it looks amazing.

It is that simple.

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No, I don’t think that this is the answer. I just can repeat: Look at the Forest-Video above… buy everything you want from the AssetStore… the best Assets for a forest, ShaderForge or whatever you want… it’s impossible to get the look that this guy creates in Unreal in one our.

For sure… content plays a big role, but there’s a (big) limit in Unity in comparison to Unreal.

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Then put the same assets in Unity and do a proper 1:1 comparison. If you can’t be assed to do that, then there’s really nothing to talk about.

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Look at the second video above. This is a 1:1 comparison. Same content, different engines.

Take a look at the flickering on Unity and so on.

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I see issues with both engines in this video. Are you suggesting that the Unreal portions have none?

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No no, I don’t want to say that Unreal is perfect. No way, but its unbelievable that in 2017 is still this hard flickering. Everything in this demo looks so much old-school 3D in comparison to the UE. Just look how the light falls, how smooth everything looks and mostly how much more realistic it looks (even if this content isn’t very realistic at all).

And all of this is out of the box, for free, no assets needed or so on. The engine does everything for you.

And this is the point… a lot of us paid and pays a lot of money into UnityTech and a lot of assets and you can do whatever you want, it’s not possible yet to get a flicker-free version or some so much more realistic look like in the forest-demo above.

For sure… you can take a lot of people, a lot of time and do it like in the How-To-Create-Adam-Video, but is it that what we want? Pay a lot of money… spend endless time to get a result, which you could get for free and much faster?

No, definitely not! So hopefully UnityTech doesn’t make the same mistakes as companies like Adobe, which are getting bigger and bigger and products gets slower, worse and missing the moment when the competitor (in Adobe’s case Serif with the Affinity products) comes and kick them of.

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No, anything is possible. You simply have to be someone who makes it happen instead of expects it to happen. In order to succeed you will have to resolve more significant issues than anything you’re actually complaining about. In perspective, these things are comparatively inconsequential.

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I just want to say that i am very happy with the rendering quality in Unity right now (5.6.1). Using forward rendering atm. (i would like to see some improvements on shader support for Deferred Render (witch i think unreal is using by default)

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In some ways it’s an apple and oranges comparison with Unity and Unreal. They’re both great game engines, but they have different focuses based on different histories.

You could flip the question “How far away is Unity from e.g. Unreal and why?” and ask “How far away is Unreal from Unity” when it comes to mobile support or Linux or whatever. I think Unity’s always prioritized it working well on a ton of platforms over pushing the high end (which seems to be a small fraction of Unity’s use cases).

If you want Unreal out of Unity, why not just use Unreal? Unity seems to struggle for when you’re pushing it for huge open worlds on consoles like Re:Core, stuff the engine wasn’t necessarily designed for. At some point it might be comparable to Unreal on a graphical AAA level, but I hope we just get a proper animation timeline before that happens! :wink:

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looks like they used a different type of depth-of-field shader in the second video. Otherwise, looked the same. Look, we get it, Unreal is cool. But Unity is Cool too. There’s no magic in the speed forest level video. You can do the same thing in Unity. You just have to be an artist, and know how to use the tools.

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What i notis from studdying allot of Unity vs Unreal picture and videos (and also by playing some Unreal games) is that they seems to have a fixed higher gamma value in gray than Unity. Making things look “lighter”. This is a fake effekt
and wont render your artworkd correctly. For me i am using an DELL U2713H calibrated monitor. The texture
i work with, looks correct in Unity, but if i put them in Unreal, they look blurry and to bright for its natural gray.
Just to add on what you said Jaimi, i agree Unity is for artist, and your artwork looks more correct onUnity engine… My general rule is, dont change the light balance. The light balance should be in the texture, and light according to this. not the other way around.

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There is no conspiracy with “big deals” to the detriment of OSX. We support OSX and Windows and will of course continue to do so. But just by looking at the numbers like OS share for the editor and the standalone you can draw your own conclusions.
And judging from our past record I’m sure new Metal or any other relevant features will will make it into Unity (like the new ARKit stuff being the latest example).

Up until recently Metal2 didn’t exist but that hasn’t stopped anyone from making successful games. There is no Jesus feature that magically transforms your game from water into wine as others already pointed out.

We are committed to enabling success for as many people as possible with our tools and services but our priorities for achieving that will not be the same as yours from time to time.

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This seems to be about two things. You should make a separate thread about compatibility with Mac, as that is an entirely different topic than Unity vs. Unreal graphics (or vice/versa). As for that “out of the box” Unreal quality, that’s in part because Unreal enables lots of post-processing effects by default. Unreal’s default setup is for high quality graphics, Unity’s default setup seems to be for performance over quality, with defaults forward rendering, gamma colors, etc. If you change a few settings in Unity, add the new Post Processing stack and enable some of those, you’ll get a similar output to Unreal’s default setup.

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Same guy as you referenced. But working in Unity.

The timestamp linked is the end result.
Also, here is from some very old docuementation which is written in March 2013 so the screenshot might be older.