A Comparative Analysis of Energy Consumption Between Visual Scripting models and C++ in Unreal Engine: Raising Awareness on the importance of Green MDD

Video game engines are used in most modern video games because they simplify and speed up development. In addition, some of the most popular engines, such as Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), also integrate visual scripting tools. Visual scripting in UE5, through Blueprints, is a model-driven development approach that replaces text code, like C++, with a visual language of interconnected nodes representing functions and data flows, forming a flowchart-like logic diagram. This approach simplifies game development by abstracting complex code into intuitive, visual models, enabling creators to construct and iterate game components without extensive programming knowledge. Although Blueprint models usually decrease the complexity of implementing components, thus accelerating the development, they might lead to less energy-efficient runtime performance than C++. In this work, we evaluate the energy consumption of three relevant video game components (health system management, inputs processing, and collections operations for an inventory), each implemented with Blueprint models and C++. The results show that the energy consumption per frame when using C++ is up to 48% lower than when using Blueprint models. The combination of artistic and technical profiles in video game developments has favoured the adoption of Blueprint models. However, there is a lack of works analyzing the energy consumption. Until this work, there was no evidence that the success of models for developing video games, like the one under study in this work, was accompanied by a cost in energy consumption for certain situations. Given the huge popularity of video games, this cost in energy might reach up to the equivalent of the energy consumption of 28 million European households.