When will I be able to Play Fantastic?

Boot Camp is a beautiful demo piece for the engine - no doubt about it. The folks at Unity did a fantastic job.

Plays nice in the editor - however- on the same Mac that I am testing it on when I go to build it out in extreme settings it can hardly play at all.

I am talking 3 frames per second. I guess you could call it a Unity moment.


Is that the reason why the build settings for the boot camp demo default at good and not Fantastic?

The engine is not optimized enough for the final executable?

We had grand plans on developing on Unity for a major release but that idea has quickly eroded. We don't have the time to wait for "updates" or to hand of millions of dollars for unlimited tech support

Count me as INCREDIBLY dissapointed

- Off to Unreal

 

/facepalm

 

It's nice to see that people properly test the game engine before they discard it as crap......... nnnaaaaaaattt

 

Unity didn't made Boot Camp Demo.
A brazilian studio called Aquiris did it.

And the speed problem is within your machine, not Unity,

 

He says clearly: it perfoms fast in editor but not standalone.

 

Sure unity has something to do with it though. I don't care that much, as to do thorough analysis of unity's performance, but some things are quite obvious. Say on my laptop (nvidia quadro card - pretty weak), the bootcamp demo and the car racing tutorial both are virtually unplayable event with moderate settings.
On the other hand games like COD4, GRID, L4D, Portal run at solid 30 to 60 fps (at lower-moderate settings, high resolution) and look better than unity's demos.
If unity wants to compete with UDK and probably Cryengine (when it becomes free) on this front they will simply have to do better.
Otherwise graphics/performance concious customers will quite rigtfully go for the alternatives.

 

interesting... anyone else got Benchmarks on Fantastic Quality for the Bootcamp built on their machine?

 

In Editor on Fantastic, I get about 300-400FPS... This drops slightly, but stays about 300 FPS in the built version.

 

Maybe the game doesn't run on "fantastic" in the editor...this would seem to make sense to me as you can do optimizations for the build, whereas the editor has to provide a dynamic update and would therefore use lower opengl specs. Really you need to compare the BUILD to MACHINE SPECS, not editor performance to build performance.

Whatever, I'd just say have fun with UDK....if you don't have brains enough to do a reasonable test with real numbers, you aren't going to get very far in either engine, or you're just poking in to troll or advertise for UDK.

 

Unity is a lot easier. Plus the people playing around with unreal pull out all the tricks: geometry is all batched and optimised, plus the art path compensates for a lot of what you see. But most of all, unreal has far tighter optimised shaders. Unity can do it, but you'll need to be writing the shaders from the ground up and optimise everything you see. I think this person would probably slow unreal down to a crawl too.

Bye.

 

We have a wide array of machines here- I have invested a decent amount of money into Unity and poured alot of time into it as well. We are doing work on Unity for clients in regards to web and ios so we are not just DUMPING the program- it has its uses.

But for AAA projects between the time it takes to "deconstruct" all of the examples and the poor performance I experienced on the MAC I am inclined to go the UDK route.

We also ran fantastic quality on a PC as well- not top of the line mind you- bout 2 years old and it also ran just as poorly. Mind you that the machine we tested it on also ran 3D applications without any trouble so it can definitely do some heavy lifting.

I am not looking to offend anyone - just stating the facts and wondering why fantastic runs piss poor (as in not optimized) when we run our own projects on a full build.

 

Thats what I am talking about- THANK YOU-

 

DaveG, no problems running fantastic on 2 year old laptop with basic nvidia card. Not smooth but much better than 3 fps.

 

Okay then what is it? Where are the discrepancies?

 

You have to admit that when someone can run COD on their lap top and they cant run the demo on the same machine there are some serious problems afoot.

Not trying to stir up trouble- just want to get what I paid for and they advertise the engine as being able to produce pc xbox and ps3 games I want to know how I can produce a full blown adventure game (DOF, shader glows, vingetting, edge blur etc with soft shadows) rather than a ios quality game with blob shadows- plain diffuse or simple shaders.

 

Can I have your pro license?

 

Yet again, nothing specific. This is all meaningless to Unity, me, other people, and even YOU.
It's all just, "I pushed button on machine of two years old and unnamed specs and didn't get the result I wanted".
If we get five people with machines (that they don't name machine specs for) where bootcamp runs at 60fps on fantastic, and five people (that also don't name machine specs) that it runs at 5 fps on fantastic, what's the resolution? Can we even analyze that? Who do we blame, Unity, the design team in brazil, the operating system, you, the driver manufacturer(s), the machine manufacturer? What does this tell us?
I'll answer, it tells us diddly, squat, and nada.

The point is, it is ALL in the details, so posting this is a waste of your time.
Here are your best choices:
1) Make a thoughtful analysis and send it directly to Unity including system specs and actual numbers, if you don't get the reply you want, move on.
2) Make a thoughtful analysis and post it requesting feedback from other users in a polite manner, if you don't get the reply you want, move on.
3) Give up and go to UDK and don't bother posting.
Seriously, how many posts are you going to put up throwing out generalizations?
Do you expect some result from this?

 

Wait.... DaveG, are you really judging a game engine's performance by comparing 2 different games ?

Did you took the 2 games internal code optimizations into account ? Their development budget ? Try to determine if CoD used more baked textures and less real time effects ?
Did you compare the real polycounts ? The rendering modes ?
Are you really professional in your analysis ?

 

Redbeer - you have ultimately lowered the bar on this thread with profanity- bravo.

I am stepping away from the thread- if anyone else has constructive comments that relate to building out the bootcamp and having consistent performance on machines that can also play games like L4D COD with the same visual quality please feel free to PM me.

 

Redbeer has brought totally valid points, sorry.

 

How do you make a proper benchmark on unitys performance? It is interesting to know what unity is capable of after all. If you get worse performance than you expect when running bootcamp on a system than performs well with games that seems equal in quality it makes you wonder doesn't it. Is it unity or is the bootcamp demo just poorly optimized. I think this is a very relevant question so again how can we benchmark unity in a easy way? Any ideas?

 

LOL, yep, I figured there would be no details forthcoming and the result would be "if anyone would like to do some analysis of building and optimizing bootcamp for me, please do so and PM me when you've finished a bunch of subjective and useless work for me".
Play games like L4D, COD, is meaningless. I'll play though, just to amuse myself, I'll build and run it later on my Q6600 with 8GB of Ram and a 9800GT after I get out of work.

I'll edit my post so I don't offend anyone with a word so bad as "s*$t" so as not to offend peoples "fine" sensibilities nor detract from such a "thoughtful and detailed analysis". I mean really...it's really detracting from such an EPIC post as this....

 

I would imagine the only way to truly do something like that would be to build the exact same game in multiple engines.

If you did, UDK would undeniably perform better than Unity, nobody here disputes that. It has lots of thing that Unity does not (multithreading, better optimized shaders, more updated PhysX, etc). However, that does not make Unity a bad engine. It has a much easier learning curve, and with enough optimization tricks you can create great-looking, great-performing games (see Interstellar Marines, for instance).

As for the bootcamp demo, I can play on Fantastic at 1280x1024 with a solid framerate on a 768mb 8800GTS with 4GB ram and an e6550 core 2 duo.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention, my framerates were on i7 Extreme (3.46 GHz), 24GB DDR3 (so, basically I could get the whole 4.00 GB for Unity without windows getting in the way) and dual 3GB GTX 590s. I'm not entirely sure, but I can only guess 400 FPS is rather disappointing!

 

You would have to build exactly the same scene in each engine with exactly the same optimizations and effects.
Therefore they have to be the EXACT same polycounts, textures, bone counts, lighting, culling, etc, all built on the same machine with the same post processing, and identical AI and computation extensive code.
The other alternative is not to consider it, and just design your game to run as fast as possible with the engine you want to use, which offers the features you want. This rules Unity out if you need DX 10 or 11 specific features, and rules UDK out if you don't like the workflow or the licensing.

 

Wether unity is a bad engine or not is of course highly subjective. What is relevant is if unity is a suitable engine for your project. Since threads like this often mount up to really harsch debates with little substance they are often useless. No benchmarking has been done and it is hard to find games or examples of higher graphical quality we have to go on faith which isn't very reassuring for serious developers. I was looking at the trailer for Trine 2 today and find myself thinking, I wonder if it is possible to do something like this in Unity with good performance, it is a light and bloom fest after all. Lets assume I have the ability from an artists perspective but I want to use the posteffects and shaders shipping with unity and not rewrite or optimize all the shaders. I can actually consider to do a similar scene, looks fun but what is peoples gut feeling?

 

Jesus christ, is that thing self aware?

 

Honestly, I can recommend getting a beast of a computer, because it means that Occlusion and Lightmap generating is SO much faster!

 

wow dude, it must be your computer, because I was getting 13 FPS on my NETBOOK (on Fantastic,that is).

The demo is fine here.

 

Um, folks, it's a bug in the ATI drivers in OS X. Not Unity's fault. Anything over about 25K polygons (in a single mesh) suffers severe performance degradation. If you turn off batching, you don't end up with such large meshes, therefore there is no slowdown.

--Eric

 

screen res on your pipe dream?

 

Well I tested it and got consistently over 60fps on fantastic on a Q6600 with 8GB of Ram and a 9800GT video card (latest nvidia drivers) at 1680x1050 resolution.
I also tested it on the Unity site running inside the browser, on fantastic, but couldn't really tell the exact fps as I can't code it in on the site obviously and don't have a separate program to guesstimate it. Frame rate was probably higher I'd suspect (and it seemed so) because it runs in the browser at much lower screen resolution even if you toggle to fullscreen.
Either way it was a very decent and playable experience with dynamic shadows, lens effects, destructible objects, and cloth sim....it wasn't Crysis 2 of course, but it won't be without DX 10/11 and a multi-million dollar development team.
Either way, it shows that all this is just personal experience and conjecture unless you apply some real math and experimentation to it.
I also run Fallout 3, WoW, WAR, LOTRO, Starcraft II, and Darksiders on this machine on full. All of those run between 40 and 60 fps on this machine, the only problem I have is Darksiders crashes every few minutes (it's a known bug)....
I hope all this quickly created non-mathematical data has helped to define some mental benchmark for all the small teams that are apparently creating the next WoW/COD/insert FOTM AAA game and can't possibly accept anything less.

 

I have exactly the same issues with a 9600 nvidia carded MBPro. And the older one, also nVidia. 8600 I think, or something like that.

I remember Bootcamp and the car thingy being INCREDIBLY slow. Completely unplayable. When I first looked into Unity I just assumed all that beauty would run well and look good. It looks good. It doesn't run fast. It was off putting.

Unity really is for light weight casual games. IMHO. Which is not a bad thing. The issue is with the marketing that strongly infers Unity is something MUCH more than that.

There's a disparity between the presentation of Unity to newcomers as a wonderchild and it's reality. That's bound to cause gripes in people when they discover it. No amount of forum bashing of the recently disillusioned is going to turn the light back on. People do not like being tricked. Especially when it's no accident.

Think it's a coincidence, in this day and age, that the most prominent image of gameplay on the front page of Unity.com is a highly rendered military shooter?

And the frame rate variations I get with prototypes in the webplayer are VERY odd. Across multiple browsers and multiple machines.

Mirrors Edge, Batman, UT3 etc all run well, at high settings on the 9600. By well I mean north of 30fps. In the case of UT3 > 60fps most of the time. That's 1440x900. No anti-aliasing, naturally.

Benchmarks of Unity are a VERY good idea.

Anyone know anything about creating one?

Should we start with basic additive blending on particles of various sizes? That'll test fill rate across platforms.

Then a maybe a couple high poly animated models with some specular and bump doing turntables under various lighting conditions?

 

1680 x 1050, non-windowed... That's my monitor's max res.

I got the money from a research project grant over my last summer holidays... I decided that the boring models they wanted me to run could finish a lot faster on a computer other than my crappy M1330!

Check out PC Specialist (in the UK), I've got my last 2 PCs from them and as far as I can tell, they offer reliably good rates (if you don't want to build the PC yourself)!

 

in that case, in answer to your question about 400fps being low. Yes it might be. That's a VERY low resolution for dual 590's.

Try a couple other benchmarks from other games/engines. At that resolution with those cards and that CPU you should see frame rate numbers that make no sense. Until you hit bottlenecks of transfer between CPU and Memory or PCI and Cards.

 

It's hard to tell in other games... I've never really benchmarked them as I've just played them

I did run the profiler, and almost 89% of the CPU time is for ShadowMapping (is it?)... I tested the same thing on my old laptop, and got 0.7FPS... If it's something I've messed around with, then I can't really add any valid information to the discussion!

Edit: Shadows.RenderShadowmap()

 

I have a Lenovo notebook with a GeForce 9600 GT Mobile and bootcamp is perfectly playable for me on fantastic.

 

I guess Redbeer edited out the profanity. Either that, or you spoofed it in your quote. It certainly belongs in there, it was as appropriate a use of profanity as I've ever seen, but now it's just.... gone!

You must admit something is afoot! I just want what I paid for.

 

What?

I'm sure the reason that those forums have no engine comparison policies is not because they are stifling dissent. I think they realize that most of the people that go into an e-rage over engine capabilities are likely trolls, or simply projecting their failures.

Of the various indie projects I've seen crash and burn, a grand total 0 of them died because their game didn't have HDR or SSAO. I believe the people in this thread gravely overestimate effect of eye-candy on the types of games they're actually capable of producing. You're going to need quite a bit of money to churn out an eye-candy game, and guess what, if you have those kinds of resources, Unity3D is probably not the best route to go. However, if you don't have the million man hours to actually produce content befitting of pushing UDK or CryEngine to the edge, you might as well stick with Unity.

With all that said, lets suppose your team is actually capable of creating a 'AAA' eye candy game utilizing UDK to a better degree than Unity. Are you ready to give up 25% in royalties? Because there goes your profit margin.

 

At least a few of us had time to cherish it for a few moments while it was there....
Honestly, my innocuous use of the word s*#t was the perfect setup for the "well I'm not staying around here to be treated like this even though I know I'm right but can provide no concrete data to support that fact!" reply. I may have to try using it in the future to see if I can illicit the same type of response.

 

yeah, it would be nice to see side by side comparisons of unity vs udk with meaningful data.

I know Frank Geppert has his sci fi corridors scenes running in both.
unity
udk

I have the sci-fi packs but they only contain the unity scene, not a udk one so I can't tell you the difference.
For the unity scene, it is quite slow actually with deferred lightning on 1280 x 800:
1. on my nvidia quadro NVS 140M its unplayable even at fastest settings. The fps is all messed up; the script shows 200fps but you can barely walk around; it is certainly less < 10fps. Probably around 1-2fps or lower.
2. on my ATI firePro 7820 it runs at around 30fps on fantastic. It can go down to 25fps. On fastest its around 60+fps, but it can go down to 30fps.

It would be great if someone takes the time to create the same scene in both engines and share the builds. Anybody can then decide which one runs/feels/looks better for themselves.

 

Bootcamp demo runs incredibly slow on my computer (Fantastic set).
25-40 fps

Win7 64bits,
8GB ram,
ATI 4870 1GB
Core2Quad9950 2.9ghz,

Wonder what will happen if Bootcamp was a real game with lots of soldiers and full game logic + GUI running simultaneously? :|

 

It does run fast. When batching isn't kicking in and hitting the driver bug, Bootcamp runs 70-120fps on my Mac at max settings, which is fairly in-line with other games. (Borderlands for example runs around 30-60fps at max settings, though it does of course have more going on.) Disabling batching makes it run fast consistently (same with the car thingy), though it would run a little better if the driver bugs didn't exist and batching worked.

Total BS. Unity's not responsible for other companies' driver bugs. I would, however, like to see a setting for the max polygons allowed in batching, since Apple doesn't seem to be in a hurry to resolve this, and it does create issues. (Though I haven't installed 10.6.7 yet, but I'm not expecting that the bug is fixed.) Maybe try not to jump to conclusions in the future. Unity's fine for much more than casual games, though a generalized engine will never be able to match a highly tuned custom engine.

--Eric

 

Eric, you've always been my favorite.

 

Actually in my personal experience, the built game runs about 20%+ faster in frames than in the editor, think about it, it totally makes sense.

Your running unity (A fairly heavy program) with the game, thats bound to drop in frame rate.
Then your running the built game, standalone as we call it, and its frames are much higher.

That was the case with my old PC, and it still is on my new one, i dont know what your saying that the frames dropped :S

Oh and for those that have trouble with the bootcamp demo, its extremely optimized and worked perfect on my old pc (dual core 2.8ghz 8800gt 1gb ddr1) And runs phenomenally on my new pc (capped at 60+ frames)

 

Just a heads-up: most of the demos (and all—I hope!—of the tutorials) are intended as educational tools. Yes, some of the flashier-looking demos are also used in expos and videos to showcase the engine, but their primary purpose is to educate and inform. That means readable code and, in Unity's case, a legible, easily navigable, project file, with assets created in a format most users will be able to study.

That means scripts place readability and clarity above optimisation.

That means assets may not be heavily optimised—if at all—to avoid confusing newcomers to Unity.

Potential Unity users may come from all walks of life, and have backgrounds varying from accountancy, all the way to working as a model rigger for a studio like Pixar. It's impossible to guess what applications these people may already have installed, so Unity's demos will avoid using assets that can only be studied in expensive professional applications where possible. E.g. PNG files can be viewed in MS Paint on Windows, or in Preview on the Mac—both of those are free. FBX-format models can be opened in almost every 3D modelling package available for both platforms, including Blender (free), Cheetah3D (Mac, low-end), and more.

Yes, Unity also supports PSDs and Maya models, but not everyone has Adobe's CS5 or Autodesk's Maya installed.

That means models and other assets are often not particularly optimised for performance. UT have no idea if you intend to test out Unity on a Core Duo 13" Macbook with Intel integrated GMA graphics and 1GB RAM, or a top-of-the-line graphics production rig with 32GB RAM and a professional graphics 1.5GB NVidia card.

In summary: tutorials and instructional demos are NEVER a good candidate for assessing real-world performance.

 

well.. Ill say this.. Unity 3d is a great engine.. however it needs 64bit support. And before you start bashing. we are working on 2 projects that are literally pushing unity3d to the LIMITS. Its to the point where we can barely manipulate objects inside the editor. and were running 2.9ghz core2duo and 5gb ram. It could do AAA quality but the editor needs optimization also

 

lol with that mid end machine you want AAA quality? Not gonna happen, sorry darrell.
UDK in 64bit has 8GB RAM, Quad core as recommended min requirement, not something that does fine for gaming at best ...

And UE costs 500k per title, not 1500 for X titles (and its UE that brought the AAA quality not UDK)

Out of my view, Unity requires 64bit for the editor only for the time being, combined with full multithreading and appropriate streaming (asset bundles are an emergency short term solution, but no replacement for a proper streaming format - as the lack of loadsceneadditive + umbra shows) in the engine in general, as thats the thing that holds it back.
AAA quality beyond that is up to your programmers and artists, if they suck your graphics quality sucks, if your shader programmers and artists are great it will look and perform great.

I guess stronger threading + 64bit support on at least beast and umbra builder are a thing we are going to see in the lifetime of U3, but anything beyond requires significant engine enhancements and quite some time and won't land before 4.x if not later

 

Thanks for the insight.. but its not that unity 3d is putting enormous load on the cpu and ram.. But its the editor itself that becomes overwhelmed. Unity 3d Editor never takes more then 50percent CPU resources and 2gb of ram. THe editor becomes so unstable that its requiring reboots because its freezing or acting erratic.