Discussion Unity does not facilitate developers.

I was reflecting...

As you all may have noticed, the web and social media continue to throw hundreds of video games and shorts with crazy graphics made on Unreal 5 in our faces.

Although Unity HDRP can give equal results and with better performance, videos and games with ultra-realistic quality in ENEMIES style can really be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Even with considerable care and diction, few are able to obtain an acceptable result.

Personally I often waste hours and weeks studying, improving shaders, lights and shadows by patiently dosing all the parameters in order to obtain a qualitatively good result but even after so much dedication I always get a mediocre level, while after watching a short graphics tutorial video on Unreal5 I immediately had a fantastic result.

What I mean is that Unity doesn't help the developers at all, while on Unreal even the last of the cretins who started developing 2 weeks ago is depopulating on social media with the absurd graphics of his game , and this for someone like me who has been developing on Unity for 8 years is really frustrating.

I apologize in advance to the Unity team for this little outburst ( reflection ), I really appreciate the efforts that are constantly being made to improve the engine, but I believe that the fundamental point of view for those who work on it is being lost, i.e. being competitive and obtaining appreciable results without having to go crazy every time.

I would like to know what you think...

 

Just some quick thoughts - I think UE5 is not a magic bullet. I best realised this with the recent release of Immortals of Aveum. You still need good art direction, high quality assets and most importantly optimisation (presuming you have compelling gameplay in the first place).

That game in particular could've just as well been made with UE4 or Unity built-in (with many custom tricks however). It's overly reliant on FSR2/DLSS, it brings a 4090 to its knees at native 4K while not looking any better than ~2017 games to the average person.

With UE5 you have to use Lumen/Nanite or you have to fall back on the time-consuming "old school" ways of baked lighting, LODs and other tricks. As such, it cannot easily scale down to low(er) end hardware, cutting off a large portion of potential players. Going by Steam stats, most people's GPUs are around the RTX 3060 performance level which isn't truly enough for UE5 without compromises.

It seems to me that while UE5's graphical tricks are impressive, they're still too much for the general population's hardware. And by the time the hardware catches up, it's very likely that the tricks will no longer be necessary as ray/pathtracing will be fully viable as the mainstream option.

All that said, there are enough faults with Unity, but it's a nice Sunday evening as I'm typing and I'd rather not spoil it.

 

it's an excellent reflection... I fully agree with the part relating to performance, in fact HDRP of Unity is considerably more performing.

The only hope is that in the future the HDRP configuration will be made easier to be able to have ENEMIES-style graphics within the reach of more people, because at the moment it seems that even the most experienced have difficulty in the adjustments.