Overview of 3D Web Rendering Engines

Learn about popular 3D rendering engines and resources for profiling with them.

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Introduction

In this section, we discuss the features, strengths, and weaknesses of popular 3D rendering engines for the web. Each of these engines is capable of creating high-quality 3D experiences, but developers may prefer one engine over another based on the type of experience they are developing and their development background.

Unity

Unity is a feature-packed native game engine that has been used to make some of the most popular indie games of all time. If you have experience developing with other native engines like Unreal Engine and Godot, Unity's development flow will feel natural to you. However, optimizing file size is a challenge for Unity experiences, as Unity supports both native and web platforms.

Overview

⭐ Engine Features

2D, 3D, Particles, Photorealistic Rendering, Animations, User Interface, Physics

📱Platform Compatibility

• Built-in support for mobile touch controls

• Integrates well with WebXR

🌍 Developer Community

• Huge community, though the web-specific community is relatively small

• Extensive documentation

• Numerous third-party plugins, though native plug-ins must be manually compiled to Wasm

🧑‍💻 Developer Experience

• First-Class 3D Editor

• Built-In Version Control

• Extensive tooling for profiling experiences

• Integrates with browser Developer Tools

📜 Licensing

• Closed source engine

• Free for hobbyists and indie teams

• Paid for teams with over $200k annual revenue.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths	Neutrals	Weaknesses
High performance ceiling First-class feature set First-class editor Experiences scale well on mobile devices Large, high quality asset store	Native game engine Write in C# Opinionated game engine architecture	WebGL rendering is not the focus of the engine Produces large builds by default

Resources

Documentation	Optimization Guides	Profiling Tools and Guides
Core Documentation WebGL Documentation Publishing Guide Creating Unity Web Builds	General Performance General Unity Optimization Optimizing Draw Calls Optimizing Shaders Technical Limitations Web Memory Optimization Web Graphics Recommendations Texture Compression WebAssembly Optimization Loading Time Optimizing Web Builds Optimizing Web Builds for Mobile	Unity Profiler Other Profiling Tools Graphics Performance Profiling Debug Web Builds How to profile Web Builds

Three.js

Three.js is the most popular 3D rendering library written in JavaScript. It is powerful, lightweight, and highly extensible, making it a good choice for developers who want to keep build sizes small and have more control over the rendering performance of their experience. However, it has few features by default, and must be extended with open source libraries to implement physics and user interfaces.

Overview

⭐ Engine Features

3D, Photorealistic Rendering, Animations

📱Platform Compatibility

• No built-in support for mobile touch controls

• Integrates well with WebXR

🌍 Developer Community

• Large community

• Good documentation, numerous examples and tutorials available

• Huge selection of third-party libraries that enable features like physics and user interfaces

• Frameworks like A-frame turn Three.js into a true game engine

• Integrates very well with React

🧑‍💻 Developer Experience

• Extremely rudimentary 3D editor

• No built-in version control

• Integrates well with browser Developer Tools

📜 Licensing

• Open source engine

• Free to use

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths	Neutrals	Weaknesses
Very small builds Large community	JavaScript engine Flexible architecture Requires lots of expertise to get great performance	Only provides rendering logic. Features like UI and physics require third-party libraries No asset store. Users must use 3rd party sites to download GLTF assets.

Resources

Documentation	Optimization Guides	Profiling Tools and Guides
Documentation Forum Learning Resources	General Performance Rendering Many Objects Rendering Many Animated Objects Leveraging Offscreen Canvas Memory Management InstancedMesh Building Efficient Three.js Scenes	JavaScript Debugging DevTools Plugin GLSL Debugging Stats.js: JavaScript Performance Monitor

PlayCanvas

PlayCanvas is a fully-featured JavaScript engine that has a great developer experience and enables high performance web applications. The engine is less flexible than other JavaScript engines, using a more opinionated Entity-Component System architecture to ensure consistent performance.

Overview

⭐ Engine Features

3D, Particles, Animations, Photorealistic Rendering, Physics, User Interface

📱Platform Compatibility

• Built-in support for mobile touch controls

• Integrates with WebXR

🌍 Developer Community

• Medium-size community

• Extensive documentation

• Integrates well with React

• Relatively few third-party libraries

🧑‍💻 Developer Experience

• First-Class 3D Editor

• Built-In Version Control

• Extensive tooling for profiling experiences

• Integrates with browser Developer Tools

📜 Licensing

• Open source engine

• Free to use source code

• Some editor features are available as a paid subscription

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths	Neutrals	Weaknesses
High performance ceiling Feature-rich editor Small build sizes	JavaScript engine Opinionated ECS Architecture The PlayCanvas Editor is accessible through the browser, rather than as a standalone application	Some editor features are paid Comparatively small asset store

Resources

Documentation	Optimization Guides	Profiling Tools and Guides
Documentation Tutorials Editor Forums	General Performance Optimization Texture Compression Batching Hardware Instancing Indirect Drawing Optimizing WebXR Loading Time Optimizing Load Time	Browser Dev Tools PlayCanvas Profiler GPU Profiling JavaScript Debugging

Babylon.js

Babylon.js is a fully-featured JavaScript engine that enables great performance, is easy to learn, and has a solid developer tooling ecosystem. Project sizes tend to be larger than PlayCanvas or Three.js, but smaller than Unity. For developers that do not need an editor but want all the features of a modern web rendering engine, Babylon is a great choice.

Overview

⭐ Engine Features

3D, Particles, Animations, Photorealistic Rendering, Physics, User Interface

📱Platform Compatibility

• No built-in touch controls

• Integrates well with WebXR

🌍 Developer Community

• Small, active community

• Extensive documentation

• Integrates with JavaScript libraries like React, Angular, and Vue

🧑‍💻 Developer Experience

• Rudimentary 3D editor

• Rudimentary playground system for prototyping in the browser

• Node-based material editor

• No built-in version control

• The Babylon Inspector and Spector libraries enable extensive profiling in the browser

• Integrates with browser Developer Tools

📜 Licensing

• Open source engine

• Free to use

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths	Neutrals	Weaknesses
High performance ceiling First class WebXR Extensive feature set	JavaScript engine Flexible architecture Supported by Microsoft	Larger file sizes for a JavaScript Engine Relatively small community

Resources

Documentation	Optimization Guides	Profiling Tools and Guides
Documentation Playground Forums	General Performance Optimization Guide Octree Optimization SceneOptimizer Offscreen Canvas Creating Loading Screens Instancing Loading Time Optimizing build sizes Resource Caching	Spector: a tool for analyzing draw calls Babylon Inspector No asset store. Users must use 3rd party sites to download GLTF assets.