Has Unreal Engine 5 just been beaten for realism?

Epic Games' Unreal Engine has become the game engine of choice for many developers. It's known for opening up access to game development and allowing the realisation of high-fidelity worlds (you might want one of the best laptops for game development).

But Gaijin Entertainment thinks its open-source Dagor Engine may beat Unreal Engine. It's released a Engine vs Unreal Engine demo, but some think the comparison raises more questions than answers.

Dagor Engine — East District - YouTube

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Gaijin Entertainment has released the full code of one of the Dagor Engine multiplayer frameworks, under permissive license along with the art sources of one of the multiplayer samples. The demos use the map made for one of Gaijin’s unannounced games.

"At first we asked our partners from Hooks Creative Studio to create a FPS map inspired by the iconic maps of the past, Gaijin says. "This map was built by them from scratch using Megascans and modern photogrammetry assets on Unreal Engine 5. Our team then ported this map into Dagor Engine for our unannounced new game.

"Since we have it already implemented in UE, we can use it for comparison and as an internal validation of our technology and we decided to share both versions with the game development enthusiasts."

For now, there was no additional authoring for performance optimizations or enhanced visuals, and they mostly used automated exporting steps except for terrain, which is so different between engines that they had to reimplement it.

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Gaijin's conclusion "Our results suggest that Dagor runs the map faster, delivering equal or arguably (pure subjectively) superior visual fidelity. This includes leveraging state-of-the-art technologies such as real-time global illumination and advanced anti-aliasing. No vendor-specific 'performance-enhancing' techniques, such as DLSS, XeSS or FSR (all of which Dagor also supports) are being used, and Dagor demo (unlike UE one) operates in native resolution in most configurations, aiming to demonstrate the engine's raw power and vendor-agnostic efficiency."

Gaijin has admitted that it's not an "apples-to-apples" comparison, something that many people have stressed in the comments on YouTube. Some note that the scenes in Dagor were designed with more detail, higher resolution assets and different colour and lighting. Others want to know more about performance.

You can access Dagor Engine tools at GitHub. In the meantime, don't miss the chance to take Epic Games' free Unreal Engine course and to download the free Project Titan Sample Game.