Dissecting games engines: The case of Unity3D

Recent trends on how video games are played have pushed for the need to revise the game engine architecture. Indeed, game players are more mobile, using smartphones and tablets that lack CPU resources compared to PC and dedicated box. Two emerging solutions, cloud gaming and computing offload, would represent the next steps toward improving game player experience. By consequence, dissecting and analyzing game engines performances would help to better understand how to move to these new directions, which is so far missing in the literature. In this paper, we fill this gap by analyzing and evaluating one of the most popular game engine, namely Unity3D. First, we dissected the Unity3D architecture and modules. A benchmark was then used to evaluate the CPU and GPU performances of the different modules constituting Unity3D, for five representative games.