Maybe they could have gotten away with this with UE5's Nanite, but that much excessive geometry would have brought everything else to its knees.
Exactly.
If unity actually delivered a workable graphics pipeline (for the DOTS/ECS stack, or at all keeping up with what UE seems to be doing) these things probably wouldn't be an issue.
Even if DOTS was perfect, the GPU would still be entirely geometry throughput bottlenecked.
Yes, UE5 has a large competitive advantage today for high-geometry content. But that wasn’t something Unity claimed could be automatically solved (so Unity is in the same position as every other engine in existence apart from UE5).
The developer should have been aware from the beginning of the need for geometry LOD: it is a city building game! The entire point is to position the camera far away from a massive number of objects!
> Unity has a package called Entities Graphics, but surprisingly Cities: Skylines 2 doesn’t seem to use that. The reason might be its relative immaturity and its limited set of supported rendering features
I'd hazard a guess their implementation of whatever bridge between ECS and rendering is not capable of LODs currently (for whatever reason). I doubt they simply forgot to slap on the standard Unity component for LODs during development, there's got to be a bigger roadblock here
Edit: The non-presence of lod'ed models in the build does not necessarily mean they don't exist. Unity builds will usually not include assets that aren't referenced, so they may well exists, just waiting to be used.
>Unity has a package called Entities Graphics
Well that's news to me. Which means that package probably isn't much older than a year. Definitely way too late for game that far in production to use.
oh, so they rebranded the hybrid renderer. That makes a lot more sense: https://forum.unity.com/threads/hybrid-rendering-package-bec...
I'm fairly certain the hybrid renderer was not ready for production.