Game engine and performance

[ReadyPlayerOne]

I've noticed on youtube videos and playing myself with the same specs some game run with high fps while other games run with low fps, even if the graphic quality are the same, i'm talking about how beauty the graphics is.

Afaik the game engine is important on this aspect, but why game devs will not use the best performing one? I mean game A will use engine A and it perform at 60fps while game B using the engine B run at 120fps on the same hardware and the game are both beauty to see, so why when the game A2 will be release will keep to use engine A instead the more performing engine B?

There are some beautifull game that are ruined by low fps or fps drop even with high end hardware, while other game just give to gamer a fantastic experience, and that's a pleasure. I.e. far cry new dawn doesn't run really bad on my pc, but sometime the fps just drop while the average is 80fps on ultra at 1080p and when this happen there is no cpu bottleneck neither gpu and i noticed this behavior in other games too, also with other pc, while in other game just seem to have a pc from 2040 running games, i.e. i run doom on ultra and what limit my fps at 144 is the vsync, and the fps never "drop" at 143 it's freaking stable at 144, same on other games.

What's your thought?

[Zando_]

Studio/Publisher preference and politics (and also licensing stuff and such as well I'd assume). 

Different engines do different things well and others not well, games vary massively in what they try to do so that's another reason there's no single standard engine.

[goto10]

the best performing one depends on what you want to do, how expensive the engine is, what type of tools they already have and the support it asks from the current hardware people have on their pcs

 

there is not a single perfect game engine that fits all the needs

 

some game engines are meant for single player games in small very detailed environments, other game engines will load as fast as they can the new maps when you pass by flying or driving but will take lots of time to load interiors of buildings

 

new engines might be friendly with new hardware, directx11 or 12, older gpus will not handle that or handle it slow

 

the perfect example is fortnite, it is meant to work quite decent on weak old hardware on low resolutions, other games might not even allow you to use low resolutions for engine or game design reasons

 

one comment alot of people does sometimes against some games is lack of optimization, i personally think that some games indeed eat lots of resources and don't deliver as expected

 

this could be caused by the developers not having enough time to make the engine work as good as possible, just deliver game and move to the next project

 

if you look at old games like cs go, this game could not be more optimized i think, some hardware run this game at 500fps while very old hardware might run it at 120fps, is a light game in terms of textures and hardware requirements, but impressive nonetheless

 

recently the discussion to use newer game engines was brought by fallout 76 and the numerous problems, bugs, developer expressed they used the same game engine because they already know how to deal with it because they already know all the tricks, capabilities and limitations, so it would mean start from 0 if they changed engine

 

if a project takes more than 5 years, a developer will not want to change at last moment the game engine, for fear of screwing things up, or loosing time fixing things

 

so much to consider

[Turtle Rig]

30 minutes ago, ReadyPlayerOne said:

I've noticed on youtube videos and playing myself with the same specs some game run with high fps while other games run with low fps, even if the graphic quality are the same, i'm talking about how beauty the graphics is.

Afaik the game engine is important on this aspect, but why game devs will not use the best performing one? I mean game A will use engine A and it perform at 60fps while game B using the engine B run at 120fps on the same hardware and the game are both beauty to see, so why when the game A2 will be release will keep to use engine A instead the more performing engine B?

There are some beautifull game that are ruined by low fps or fps drop even with high end hardware, while other game just give to gamer a fantastic experience, and that's a pleasure. I.e. far cry new dawn doesn't run really bad on my pc, but sometime the fps just drop while the average is 80fps on ultra at 1080p and when this happen there is no cpu bottleneck neither gpu and i noticed this behavior in other games too, also with other pc, while in other game just seem to have a pc from 2040 running games, i.e. i run doom on ultra and what limit my fps at 144 is the vsync, and the fps never "drop" at 143 it's freaking stable at 144, same on other games.

What's your thought?

The best engine is the Unreal 4 Engine.  Best graphics and most optimized to run well on plethora of systems.

[Zando_]

6 minutes ago, Turtle Rig said:

The best engine is the Unreal 4 Engine.  Best graphics and most optimized to run well on plethora of systems.

It doesn't run as well on AMD stuff as it does on Nvidia and Intel. 

Frostbite is a great engine, but it varies from game to game. Mass Effect Andromeda is a mess but Battlefront 2015 is a god-level example of an extremely well built game, it runs great on everything from low end hardware to biggboye SLI setups. And then Battlefront II 2017 won't even touch SLI. All on the same engine. 

 

Whatever engine Destiny 2 uses (it's an in-house one made by Bungie) is very well optimized, it works well on a plethora of systems. 

 

I could go on and on because there's zillions of engines, bottom line is: 

33 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Different engines do different things well and others not well, games vary massively in what they try to do so that's another reason there's no single standard engine.

There is no single best game engine because there is no single publisher/studio or game genre. Same reason there's no best car, no best phone, no best PC, no other "best" thing in general. Well not 100% true, we can all agree that a nice oxygen/nitrogen combo with some other gasses thrown in in small amounts is the best thing for humans to breathe. But nearly everything else depends on what you're doing with it, due to the massive variation in desires and workloads there's never any general, single, "best" thing. You have to go into more specifics and weigh a lot more variables to find the best for a certain task. 

[PlayStation 2]

Game engines are either designed for a certain type of game (like the Source engine and the Ego engine) or is an open platform for various games (like the Unreal Engine and Renderware). It all depends on what the games and the engines want to achieve.

Crytek, for example, heavily worked CryEngine into being a high-tech engine at the cost of performance. Meanwhile, Turn10 worked the engine for the Forza games to hit 60 frames per second first and to look good second.

It's all about goals in the end.