Hey everyone.

I've been using Unity to make video games for a few years, but I've found the loading times to be much too long (for example, just opening the editor can easily take a minute and a half, compiling code after adding or deleting just one line of code can be 10-20 seconds, as well as loading test mode in the editor). So I was just wondering, how do the Godot loading times compare to this?

Thanks in advance!

P.S. I use a pretty good computer, so it's not my computer that's causing the slow loading times - as far as I'm aware.

If you use GDScript then there is no compilation involved - assuming of course that you use a pre-built binary of the engine. If you compile the engine from source then that is dependent on your hardware more than anything.

I use GDScript on a fairly poor computer. I do not compile from source.

(with that info in mind)

I find the load times very quick on godot - both to open the engine and to play the game or the scene I'm working on . it may depend more on what game you're making? I had slow times in unity too, but not quite as slow as what you say.

but from my experience godot is much faster.

Thanks for the reply! The loading times sound great. I'll definitely consider trying Godot out for one of my next games.

Load times on Godot are some of the best available. The engine loads in seconds, and testing a game on PC usually only takes a few seconds (for smaller projects) or for larger games maybe something like 10 or 15 seconds. Also, for mobile Godot is the best because you can test in maybe around 20 seconds, whereas Unity and Unreal can take several minutes. And you can still edit the project while it is running and see changes instantly, which is a huge time saver. Even shader edits are quick, overall it is very fast.

Wow, sounds amazing! Thanks for letting me know!

I've used Unity too, and Godot's loading time is infinitely better when opening the editor and starting a new project, it takes less than a second usually! I haven't done any big projects, so I can't really speak for how it performs when loading large scenes and such, but I bet it performs pretty well.

Godot is far superior than Unity concerning loading and resource management, and I use c# , Unity is a mess and overkill

21 days later

@Megalomaniak Why should pre-built binaries vs compiled myself binaries make any difference?

Because compiling the binary itself takes time. ;)

That would be a different issue than “loading time”...

But I think I understand what you are saying. If you need to compile to play the game then that would be an issue... heh.

FWIW, the docs for writing your own module detail ways to handle this, though the information is designed for Linux systems. (Sorry Windows)

16 days later

Yeah. Part of why we moved out of Unity and into Godot was it was taking 5 minutes for me and my artist to open a project with our own assets, a bunch of plugins, and other messy stuff. Changing code took 30 seconds to compile even though I deliberately set up C# assemblies to break up the process. We hadn't even started putting in full world maps or anything. It was just a handful of characters. Another aspect is Unity caches everything in its library with metadata so you can reference assets without relying on their direct path. This is a nice QoL feature and I do miss it going into Godot, since everything's based on asset paths and adjusting folders and names is a pain, but for Unity it was disproportionately messy when things added up.

Godot is lean in that it seems to just grabs assets as told to for the current situation and doesn't compile (unless building a pak? I assume GDScript has a bytecode-ized variant for export) So it doesn't have to worry. Your worst bottleneck is probably if you're on an HDD or your computer is powered by potatoes and lemons. To be fair, I've not reached the point our project is too big yet, but if Godot isn't really doing any asset library maintenance on boot and just dragging assets into exported paks, then it's probably not going scale into a big problem.

Load times, well, it's probably just "here's asset path, unzip and decode, dump raw into RAM" and probably not very bad unless the asset itself is the problem or you're using encrypted files on a very weak CPU.

I'd actually like to see if there's any good source of info for Godot's management of assets and experience on how it gets when your asset count is high. The freedom is dangerous in it seems easy to lose grasp of good organization practices and start dumping things where they probably don't belong.

I liked the graphics on Unreal, but the compile times were intensive. Even doing a simple edit would trigger like 9,000 shaders to have to recompile, taking 10 minutes or more. Also, once your project got bigger it could take a long while to open, especially if you update the engine version (I waited around 45 minutes one time). This is a huge drag. Also, most of the new features on UE5 aren't supported on Linux, so that was the deal breaker for me.