Developer's ECS In Custom C Engine Outperforms Unity's DOTS

Gabriel Dechichi, a developer you might remember from his challenge of making an Unreal Engine game in 4 weeks, has demonstrated his ECS system in C, claiming it runs roughly 17 times faster than Unity's DOTS.

According to Gabriel, the simulation runs 100,000 boids, rendering around 31 million triangles per frame. The average simulation time is about 2.4 ms in the C engine, compared to around 44.4 ms in Unity's ECS. The test was conducted on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8 cores, 16 threads) with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU and 32 GB of RAM, running in Chrome with force-high-performance-GPU enabled.

"Frame time difference is about 5 times, as the demo is GPU-bound. The ECS simulation runs at roughly 2.4ms on my C engine, vs roughly 44.4 ms for Unity ECS. Time is measured equally on both demos by sampling how long the ECS world takes to update," shared the developer. 

It's impressive that he built a system like this on his own, but some understandable skepticism has arisen. If you want to check out the demo code, it's available here, and a detailed article is planned for publication this weekend for those who want to dive deeper.

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