This is less a problem that I need concern myself with, and more something which I would like to know about out of curiosity.

I have noticed that the system requirements for Tyranny are actually quite high. My gaming desktop requires a lot of resources from my hardware in order to run smoothly on the maximum settings on 1080p. I had originally hoped that my old laptop would be able to play this game well, and it does - all things considred - but the framerate still tends to drop, and the 3D graphics simply do not look all that fantastic particularily because I cannot afford to turn the AA higher than 4x because the performance becomes annoyingly low if i do so. The laptop runs the game in 720p.

So why is that? This game is mostly 2D environments, and the 3D character models and environments, while looking good, do not actually seem to be that graphically intensive. What makes this game so hard to render?

If anyone knows, I would like to hear their insight.

Leo

The game is using Unity Engine .

You did not list the laptop specs, so hard to say anything about it. 720p with 4x AA, sounds like it's doing pretty good to me though. The main portion of the game is played 3D isometric, not much 2D.

I see... but aren't the environments 2D drawings? The laptop has 8GB RAM and just the old intel HD 4000 graphics. Still though, for being able to play Mass Effect 2 at a pretty smooth >30 fps on the highest settings, It's a little strange to see it playing this game at around 20 fps. Is the engine that inefficient? Why do developers chose to use it then?

I think it's more that Unity is used by indie devs who may not have the time and resources to optimize their games to the ideal level.

That does indeed sound like a good theory. It's like programming in Python vs C++. The former is easier for the programmer but it is harder for the computer to execute the code since it has to translate through more "layers" to get to the machine code. C++ does not have so many layers between itself and machine code, but that makes it difficult for the programmer... and the code just looks like the spaghetti monster.

This. People who write their own engines usually also care about the performance of their tech. Meanwhile Unity attracts creative guys who don't know anything nor care about tech, just throw everything they have at it and then whine that their game runs like shit despite looking much worse than AAA games, oblivious to the fact that they could easily take many steps that professional studios take in order to improve performance. Plus a chain is only as strong as its weakest link so even in an experienced studio you will sometimes find some errors that make the game bring even strong machines down to their knees despite no noticeable visual gain. Well, I think that's not quite the point KoreaBeat was making. I mean, sure, in an engine like Unity all game logic can only be written on a high level to begin with but the point is that despite that you can take many measures to improve performance. To use that programming language analogy of yours: a shitty algorithm is a shitty algorithm, regardless of what language it is written in, but some amateur using Python will be quick to just blame the language and call it a day.

Edit: Also, in my experience the game logic is rarely the bottleneck, most of the time it's something rather stupid like a whole load of unnecessary and possibly badly written shaders, too high poly meshes or too many instances.

It would help to know the specs of the computer. For the record I play Pillars of Eternity perfectly fine on an i3-5005u laptop on Linux, the same engine is used by Tyranny so performance should be close (I don't own the game so I cannot test it).


As for Unity - I play a lot of Unity-made games on my laptop and they work just fine. I also have a slower laptop with N2840 CPU and it can handle some Unity games fine provided I reduce the quality a bit. The engine is definitely not perfect and while it can truly be a bit of a hog, it's definitely not as bad as some people make it out to be.