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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Yet the three major game engines Unreal, Unity and Godot all have a GC on their infrastructure, and Capcom is quite happy with their .NET fork on RE Engine.

Also every single graphics application that uses Metal or DirectX, relies on reference counting as GC algorithm.

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I’m sure those three engines have had no issues with performance whatsoever right?

Oh shit…

Game developers are always trying to push the boundaries. The only game engines without performance issues are ones hardly being used.

There is a difference between pushing more polygons or higher resolution, and trying to fix stutters caused by the GC…

There isn’t though.

Garbage collectors aren’t magical black boxes with no levers, and you can use them how you like.

You address performance problems relating to GC the same as you do anything else: measure, analyze, optimize, repeat.

The difference is that you don't need to be pushing the boundaries at all to get into trouble with the GC. All you have to do is use it as it's intended.

Alternatively they could be fixing stutters caused by using malloc() on the wrong place.

Much rarer and easier problem to deal with. Besides, bump allocators are widely used in games programming, which essentially eliminates this entire class of performance issues. Good luck using one in a GC'ed language.

I am sure that many of the issues were a skills issue as well.

What engine do you recommend?

Depends on the game

Do you have any source taking about GC caused performance issues in those engines?

Too many to post, you can just google “{engine} gc spike” for example.

Heck, there is a whole cottage profession of experts who get called into fix GC related performance issues with Unity.

So are you saying this cottage industry achieves success or the industry formed around an impossible task?

A cottage industry is built around making rocks look good too. Is that an indicator that games are good or bad at making rocks?

I work in performance optimization (I guess the cottage industry you're talking about?) and GC issues haven't been close to top 10 problems in any of the engines or OSes we've dealt with lately, so I'm wondering what you're on about there.

Can you quantify and elaborate more how much GC is an issue for something like Unreal engine?

I mean, you can always add enough triangles, shaders, entities, etc... to make any engine slow to a crawl... Anything that pushes state of the art will have more performance issues than something that doesn't.

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