Is CompareTag faster than checking directly the GameObject?

Questions & Answers
1

Raising the assumption that i have some objects moving around in a FixedUpdate and only care if they collide with a specific object.

If this object has been set with a custom Tag, and the others had a GameObject variable holding the reference to it, in the case of a collision, what would be faster or less resource consuming:

Use CompareTag to compare the tag string or make a direct comparison using the stored GameObject reference ?

I’ve been making some profiling, but would appreciate the opinion of someone with a little more experience.

2

We don’t know exactly how CompareTag is implemented on the native side. However since tags are actually strings it would require either a string comparison (that would also be true when a dictionary lookup is used internally since it would be necessary to create a hash of the passed string).

So a direct reference comparison would always be faster as long as you don’t need any GetComponent calls, though even then if the gameobject only has a few components, GetComponent might also be slightly faster than CompareTag I guess.