Actually I was referring to the engine's performance, as graphics wise Unity is pretty competent.
I remember it used to suffer from stutters and low performance in some particular cases for most games.
Both videos show extremely bad frame pacing/stutters.
That's Unity for you.
Unity's rep comes more from the good games that people wanted to be great from developers that seemed capable but that suffered technical problems nevertheless... which unfortunately are not uncommon to Unity. You can read a little more about Unity from both player and developer perspectives on a recent
Unity Engine 2021 thread.
From my experience there seems to be some kind of issue with stuttering on camera panning where the camera movement isn't updated at the same rate as the current refresh rate, so it looks like every X frame is being dropped and looks unpleasant. It isn't tied to any kind of system bottleneck afaik and when its present it even happens at the lowest settings and resolution the game can support.
So even if it was "bad coding" issues like Arkham Knight in UE3(.5), at least with that you can brute force through frametime spikes and get smooth performance by using a GPU that didnt exist when AK came out. Thats not the case here and the problem persists no matter what I do. I've had the problem in a bunch of games, often its related to the the engine using borderless window by default instead of exclusive fullscreen and you having to use a command-line argument to get the game to use ex-fullscreen but that also doesn't always fix it.
Exo One and Outer Wilds are two games where I was never able to solve it (Well actually I did solve it once... for 10 mins in Exo One by setting my output to 1440p@120hz and then using external programs to cap the fps to 60 and hide the tear-line, but thats just getting round the issue in a weird way most can't/won't be able to), but I didn't like Outer Wilds anyway so didnt go back and try it again with newer tools I've found out about since I played it (ie Scanline-Sync in RTSS).
I beleive its tied to how the engine handles object/camera update rates + synchronization because even if you force ex-fullscreen (and disable fullscreen optimisations in windows 10 but you should be doing that on every .exe anyway) and use external sync solutions it doesn't make fix it often. Many developers of Unity engine games seem to not have the issue so perhaps its the result of a off-the-shelf module within Unity that people are using that has the issue and so it persists across many titles.
Ori 2 had it at launch but it was because they didnt put ex-fullscreen as a menu option until a month later patch. You could already force it via the command-line on launch day though and that fixed 99% of the stutters so was just a (big) oversight on the devs part. The remaining stutters were fixed with a performance patch that altered how it loaded the map as you moved, although tiny autosave stutters are still present today but I accept that because all engines have it (RE Engine is really bad for the loading stutters, if you constantly run through the rooms/map it happens quite often in RE8 for example).
I emailed the dev of Exo One and after some back and forth he said this:
"Thanks for sending through your details. This one is tricky, I don’t see anything obvious in your log files to indicate there’s a potential issue. It’s a strange effect and I’d say it’s unlikely to be a performance related issue, I’m thinking maybe more driver related? Anything you can think of that alters the default settings for the way your monitor and video card run, for example some monitors also allow hardware level frame rate locks and the like, is worth disabling to see if it changes.
Unity may be a potential cause as well combined with the hardware if things are expecting exact frame rates, I’ve come across this sort of thing before where not everything is as perfectly frame-aligned as Unity suggests but unfortunately they don’t acknowledge the issue.
Sorry I can’t offer more at the moment, we will keep an eye on it. Thanks for reaching out."
Which was then I started to go looking for others having the problem (users and devs) and started to piece to together what the issues are. Probably the reason this issues crops up so much and there hasn't been a concerted effort to fix it is because most PC users already run games at too high a setting and/or resolution + at the wrong refresh rate to maintain the v-sync lock, which introduces v-sync stuttering anyway and thats way worse/will just blend in with the problems I've spoken of above so they wouldn't bring this up.
I'm a total nerd who's loved tweaking games and settings for 20+ years and I didn't fully understand all the forms of stuttering and how they are introduced until about 5 years ago so I'm sure it'd be a kind of "I just thought thats how games moved" effect for most people if I were to point these things out + them usually being hidden by way worse problems with how the game is configured (eg v-sync stutter) makes it a fool's errand anyway.
TL;DR - Yes Unity CAN make a game suck by having these stuttering problems but most major teams seem to have devs onboard that can bypass, avoid or mitigate the issue by whatever means. So while its reductive to say a game will definitely be crap (technically) just because its made in Unity Engine, there is definitely a not-small chance it could have these problems if the dev isn't aware of them/doesn't know why they happen and therefore avoid them.
If you are a big "stuttering-noticer" then you'll see it, if you don't really get bothered by v-sync stutter (when you drop below refresh rate) then this won't bother you at all.
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