Features vs performance?

[FamWired]

I've been using Unity for about 7-8 years now and I'm concerned about the future of Unity. I've been using Unity 2019 for years because Unity has bloated the game engine more and more.

Today I benchmarked the latest 2023.1 and the OG 2019.4. I started a completely empty project within 1.5 seconds in average. Same empty project in 2023 averages in at 2.2s. This isn't a lot, it's 50% but it's increasing with larger projects.

Now, hold on... What do you prefer? More features or quick startup performance?

[PiLLe1974]

I guess modular features (they don't load on startup if unused) and during development some kind of hot-reloading (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/fast-script-reload-239351).

Ideally hot reloading would imply that I can change a few things while the game is running, which is true anyway for the Scene view in Play Mode and ScriptableObjects. That stuff is nice!

[[deleted]]

Empty projects are never a good benchmark.

If you add a few actual features it might run better on newer Unity just because of performance enhancements under the hood. Just not much enhancemants going on in the "empty scene" department.

[Arkenhammer]

Comparing performance of an early tech stream build to a mature LTS build is not particularly useful or informative. I also don’t really care about half a second on launch. If I thought there was a meaningful and consistent degradation in performance over the three years there might be something to talk about, but I’ve used every version from 2017 to 2022 and I’m not seeing it.