Performance - Abandoned Spaceship Demo

General
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Hello Community,

I heard that Godots realtime 3D performance can be much worse than other Engines like Unreal or Unity for example when your doing a more shiny scene. I didn’t want to believe that so I wanted to see for myself:

I tested the Spaceship Demo on 3 PCs with Godot 4.3. (It also doesnt do much with the performance if I turn off SSAO, SSIL, Tonemapper, etc. maybe 2-3 FPS max.):

  1. High-End Windows PC: 60 FPS all good with all resolutions.
  2. Apple MacBook Air M1 8GB (2020):
    – 30-33 FPS on 720p
    – 15 FPS on 1080p
    – 8-12 FPS 1600p High-DPI.
    – 45 FPS with Mobile Renderer on 1080p, 60 FPS on 720p.
  3. ASUS ROG Notebook, Geforce GTX 960M (2014):
    – 18-35 FPS on 720p with lots of stuttering.
    – 20 FPS on 1080p, no stuttering (Interesting that it beat M1 here!)
    – 45-50 FPS with Mobile Renderer, 60 FPS on 720p

My point is, the GTX 960M Notebook can play Genshin Impact at 30-60 FPS on Medium settings 720p depending on location. It can also play Witcher 3 Wild Hunt at 30 FPS with Medium settings (the original version, not the enhanced one of course). 22-23 FPS on 1080p.

And that are full games which have a lot more going on than just rendering like Networking, AI, etc.

The biggest issue is that I have no comparable scene in Unity or Unreal, the best would be to have the exact same scene with same setup in those two engines to compare the performance. Like would I get 60 FPS just because its in Unreal/Unity? Probably not, but that are the questions I have in my head now. At the moment I cant judge it, I cant say Godot is slow without proper comparison. I can only refer to those two games I tested above but maybe those are way more optimized.

What I figured however is that the scene of the spaceship demo seems to be a bit heavy, as it renderers 2.5 Million Primitives due to shadows, vfx, lots of lights, etc. while the models itself are quite simple. Or perhaps the Author just made the demo just to show the visuals of godot without optimizing for low end devices.

Anyway, while I think Godot is a great engine, I am a bit concerned after this. What do you guys think? Are my concerns justified?

1 Like
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Like you said yourself, it’s gonna be tricky to pull direct comparisons if you don’t have the same scene / setup. Games you mentioned are heavily optimized (Witcher has it’s own engine built for world streaming, Genshin is using Unity AFAIK, but is optimized to run on phones), in comparison the space ship scene is probably not very optimized (like you said yourself). Target platform, Editor performance vs build perfomance, driver support etc are also some factors.

I’d recommend trying the famous Sponza sample scene (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-technology/graphics-research/samples.html)
which AFAIK was made exactly for that purpose, and I’ve seen people setting it up in Godot, Unreal and Unity.

Once a comparable scene is setup, it’s definitely interesting to see some performance benchmarks!