Today we are going to look at a direct performance/rendering comparison of the Dagor Engine vs Unreal Engine 5. The Dagor Engine was open sourced in 2023 and is the long running game engine powering the popular hit game War Thunder, as well as a dozen other titles, IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey being perhaps the most famous of the other titles. Dagor Engine creator Gaijin Interactive just released a new demo of Dagor Engine, but also went as far as to implement mostly the same demo using Unreal Engine 5 to directly compare the capabilities and performance of the two engines.Details from the Gaijin blog:Gaijin Entertainment is thrilled to release the full code of one of Dagor Engine multiplayer frameworks, under permissive license along with the art-sources of one of the multiplayer samples. Weve also published a set of two demos showing how the same map made for one of Gaijins unannounced games works on Dagor Engine and Unreal Engine 5, a platform renowned for its cutting-edge graphics and features.This initiative follows our decision to release the Dagor Engine as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that happened a year ago.At first we asked our partners from Hooks Creative Studio to create a FPS map inspired by the iconic maps of the past. This map was built by them from scratch using Megascans and modern photogrammetry assets on Unreal Engine 5. Our team then ported this map into Dagor Engine for our unannounced new game. Since we have it already implemented in UE, we can use it for comparison and as an internal validation of our technology and we decided to share both versions with the game development enthusiasts.As for now, there was no additional authoring (such as specular probes, occluders, portals, etc) made for performance optimizations or enhanced visuals with utilization of some of those, performance can be improved even further we intentionally mostly used automated exporting steps except for terrain, which is so different between engines that we had to reimplement it and some decals or object placement which was adjusted by purely subjective preferences..Our results suggest that Dagor runs the map faster, delivering equal or arguably (pure subjectively) superior visual fidelity. This includes leveraging state-of-the-art technologies such as real-time global illumination and advanced anti-aliasing. No vendor-specific performance-enhancing techniques, such as DLSS, XeSS or FSR (all of which Dagor also supports) are being used, and Dagor demo (unlike UE one) operates in native resolution in most configurations, aiming to demonstrate the engines raw power and vendor-agnostic efficiency.We understand this isnt a perfectly fair apples-to-apples comparison, as the Unreal Engine version could likely be further optimized by experienced developers. Nevertheless, we hope this public release of both demos will inspire the community to explore Dagor Engines capabilities and potential. Were committed to continue proving the community with more and more tools to create and innovate.Key LinksDagor Engine vs Unreal Engine Blog PostDagor Engine GitHubYou can learn more about Dagor Engine vs Unreal Engine and see both of the demos in action in the video below.