The total energy cost of computing activities is steadily increasing and projections indicate that it will be one of the dominant global energy consumers in the coming decades. However, perhaps due to its relative youth, the video game sector has not yet developed the same level of environmental awareness as other computing technologies despite the estimated three billion regular video game players in the world. This work evaluates the energy consumption of the most widely used industry-scale video game engines: Unity and Unreal Engine. Specifically, our work uses three scenarios representing relevant aspects of video games (Physics, Statics Meshes, and Dynamic Meshes) to compare the energy consumption of the engines. The aim is to determine the influence of using each of the two engines on energy consumption. Our research has confirmed significant differences in the energy consumption of video game engines: 351% in Physics in favor of Unity, 17% in Statics Meshes in favor of Unity, and 26% in Dynamic Meshes in favor of Unreal Engine. These results represent an opportunity for worldwide potential savings of at least 51 TWh per year, equivalent to the annual consumption of nearly 13 million European households, that might encourage a new branch of research on energy-efficient video game engines.

翻译：计算活动的总能源成本稳步增长，预测表明未来几十年内，它将成为全球主要能源消耗来源之一。然而，尽管全球约有三十亿常规视频游戏玩家，但可能因其相对较新，视频游戏行业尚未形成与其他计算技术相同的环境意识。本研究评估了最广泛使用的行业级视频游戏引擎（Unity和Unreal Engine）的能耗。具体来说，我们使用代表视频游戏相关方面的三种场景（物理、静态网格和动态网格）来比较这两款引擎的能耗，旨在确定使用其中任一引擎对能耗的影响。研究证实，视频游戏引擎的能耗存在显著差异：在物理场景中，Unity能耗优势达351%；在静态网格场景中，Unity优势为17%；而在动态网格场景中，Unreal Engine优势为26%。这些结果表明，全球每年有潜力节省至少51太瓦时，相当于近1300万欧洲家庭的年消耗量，这可能激励新的节能视频游戏引擎研究方向。