Performance Analysis of Game Engines on Mobile and Fixed Devices

Mobile gaming is an emerging concept wherein gamers are using mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, to play best-seller games. Compared to dedicated gaming boxes or PCs, these devices still fall short of executing newly complex 3D video games with a rich immersion. Three novel solutions, relying on cloud computing infrastructure, namely, computation offloading, cloud gaming, and client-server architecture, will represent the next generation of game engine architecture aiming at improving the gaming experience. The basis of these aforementioned solutions is the distribution of the game code over different devices (including set-top boxes, PCs, and servers). In order to know how the game code should be distributed, advanced knowledge of game engines is required. By consequence, dissecting and analyzing game engine performances will surely help to better understand how to move in these new directions (i.e., distribute game code), which is so far missing in the literature. Aiming at filling this gap, we propose in this article to analyze and evaluate one of the famous engines in the market, that is, “Unity 3D.” We begin by detailing the architecture and the game logic of game engines. Then, we propose a test-bed to evaluate the CPU and GPU consumption per frame and per module for nine representative games on three platforms, namely, a stand-alone computer, embedded systems, and web players. Based on the obtained results and observations, we build a valued graph of each module, composing the Unity 3D architecture, which reflects the internal flow and CPU consumption. Finally, we made a comparison in terms of CPU consumption between these architectures.