Upcoming game engine “Arete Engine” claims to be 1000x faster than Unity, taking optimization out of developers’ hands 

San Francisco-based developer Arete Games announced and released the 0.1 version of their game engine Arete Engine on November 11. Arete Engine is a 2D/3D game development engine that is currently compatible with the PC (Windows/Mac/Linux), iOS and VR, and is planned to have console, Android and Steam Deck support in the future. 

Arete engine is a Rust-based ECS game engine that boasts a novel unified-memory architecture that optimizes game performance on unified-memory devices. Development of the engine originally started about two years ago as a project at Stanford University. Aside from Rust, its supported programming languages include C, C++, etc., while support for C# is in the works as well. 

In the case of unified-memory device builds, Arete Engine supposedly eliminates the need to copy data from the CPU to the GPU at each frame, significantly reducing Overhead compared to conventional game engines. In turn, this optimization is to prevent bottlenecks in data processing, especially in complex scenes with many dynamic objects. The developer claims that it is “1000x faster than Unity” in CPU frame time. 

Another feature of the engine is Load Balancing. This is a mechanism that identifies bottlenecks in the system and allocates rendering tasks between the CPU and GPU. Not limited to unified memory, it is expected to improve system load balance, thus positively effecting frame rate.  This feature could be especially useful for customized PCs and Android devices, where specifications vary heavily, and system bottlenecks are difficult to predict. 

The Version 0.1 of Arete Engine released publicly this time around is still in the early development stage and is meant to introduce the basic functions of the engine. The previously mentioned Load Balancing is currently disabled. There is a development roadmap  available, according to which various functions are expected to be added as development progresses. 

Samples of simple game codes have also been provided – Tanks, a recreation of the official Unity tutorial game and Space (seen in the video below), a shoot’em up game based on Galaga and Space Invaders. 

Arete Engine will be free to use for learning, internal projects and experimentation. As for commercial projects, “Early adopters” will be able to use the engine for free for projects up to $1 million in annual revenue, while projects over $1 million will require a 1% royalty. Revenue will be self-reported by developers. 

More detailed information on Arete Engine is available on the official site. 

Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-11-13 12:23 JST)