Towards Green Game Software Engineering: A Comparative Analysis of Energy Consumption Between the Widespread Unity and Unreal Video Game Engines

Context: The total energy cost of computing activities is steadily increasing, and projections indicate that it will be one of the dominant global energy consumers in the coming decades. However, the video game sector has not yet developed the same level of environmental awareness as other computing technologies despite the estimated three billion regular video game players in the world.

Objective: This work evaluates the energy consumption of the most widely used industry-scale video game engines: Unity and Unreal Engine.

Method: Specifically, our work uses three scenarios representing relevant aspects of video games (Physics, Static Meshes, and Dynamic Meshes) to compare the energy consumption of the engines. The aim is to determine the influence of using each engine on energy consumption.

Results: Our research has confirmed notable differences in energy consumption: 351% in Physics in favor of Unity, 17% in Static Meshes in favor of Unity, and 26% in Dynamic Meshes in favor of Unreal Engine.

Conclusion: Considering the estimated three billion regular video game players worldwide and the high computational requirements of the sector, the magnitude of potential savings is a relevant issue for the research community. This might encourage a new branch of research on energy efficient video game engines.