Last night I performed my first official render comparison test with Unity3D's latest released version. Unity 4.0 may be a significantly different story, but I use what I have access to for now. I was unable to test against Unity Pro version which supports static instancing which may make a significant difference in the results, but here is my test case and what was found:
Test Case --
20,000 Cubes assigned to Diffuse texture
500 Point lights
0 moving objects
Deferred Rendering configured.
720x480 resolution
Physics Disabled
Input Disabled
Unity3D 3.5.6f4 --
Editor Crashed
Debug build Crashed
Release build Runs
FPS in Debug: n/a
FPS in Release: ~3-4
RuneEngine v2 --
Editor n/a
Debug Build Runs
Release Build Runs
FPS in Debug: not tested due to Unity3D results
FPS in Release: ~135-140 as Active Window ~35-40 as Inactive Window
Further tested to determine threshold for 30FPS with 500 deferred lights found that this can support up to 400,000 diffuse textured cubes in conjunction with 500 deferred lights non-moving while remaining above 30FPS.
Ok, a lot of abstract information. Well, for those who are not aware 28+ is a solid framerate to avoid jerkiness, but some video formats only push 24/25 FPS and remains unnoticed. Therefore RuneEngine is fully capable of pushing non-jerky frames in this test case and well beyond the specific test case while Unity is not.
My analysis from these results is as follows, the new Update Systems and the Rendering Pipeline are optimal, though are still receiving some improvements. However, Unity3d is likely to have some overhead that RuneEngine at this time has not accounted for. Such as the Quad tree sorting. In the basic scene all objects are rendered, but Unity would still be processing this sort. Depending on the nature of how they do this that could be the cause of what is seen. However, I must note that prior to the new Update System in RuneEngine my framerate results were rather similar to what is seen in Unity3D suggesting that this optimization may be the sole reason for the substantial performance difference.
Time will tell if this landslide performance difference continues to be so, but at the moment RuneEngine outperforms Unity3D by ~45-46 times...
I intend to do some further testing with this as time progresses, as well as confirming the performance of Unity3D Professional in comparison. For now this is a pretty big success for RuneEngine I believe.
