koobas.hobune.stream
Can Unity Engine be run on the Raspberry Pi 4?
All I want to know is that whether I can run and make games using the unity engine on a Raspberry Pi 4 just like I can on the PC.
I had a PC which I had been using to create a game on the Unity Engine 2018 but now since I don't have my Laptop, I have been looking for something that can run unity and found out about Raspberry Pi 4. Raspberry Pi 4 promises to be able to be transformed into a fully functioning computer just like any other PC. I don't doubt that but what bothers me is that my friend thinks that it won't be able to support that much graphics. I have been trying to find the answers but the findings are confusing and I don't really have enough knowledge to compare the graphic compatibilities and all.
PLEASE HELP!
Well, that can not be easily answered. First a Raspberry PI is first and foremost hardware, so it depends on what OS you're using. Next different PI versions have different GPU chips. Unity can build for linux, however officially it only support Ubuntu desktop as fas as I remember (don't ask me about the version ^^). Apart from native builds the best bet may be a WebGL build running in a browser that supports WebGL. I only have an RPI 3b. The Chromium based browser that was shipped with the stock raspbian OS does support WebGL 1.0 and Untiy builds do seem to load up, however they never run on my PI. Another issue is that this simple browser, even it supports WebGL, doesn't support WebAssemblies. So newer WebGL builds won't even try to start. If you have a RPI 4, why don't you just try it? Over here I have a list of my examples / tests which have been build with various Unity versions.
Since the RPI4 supports OpenGL ES 3.1 I would assume that the hardware should be capable of running Unity content, at least from the graphics point of view. My RPI3 only supports OpenGL ES 2.0.
So it all boils down to your exact hardware and of course which OS you install on it and how well the OS driver support is for this particular hardware.
@Bunny83 Well thank you for the answer first of all. I don't have a Raspberry Pi but I was preparing to buy one, and all this only for the purpose of making games which I won't prefer to buy a whole PC for. So I just wanted to know whether I should buy it or not.
And in case you need to know, I would be buying a Raspberry Pi 4 B, 4 GB RAM variant. And I think that the software wouldn't be a problem since it can already be made to run Windows OS, as far as I know.
Wait a sec, you want to run the Unity editor on the Raspberry pi? not the game / application you made? That most likely won't work. The Unity editor usually has even higher specs than the engine ^^. In theory it could work, but I would probably agree with your friend that the RPI probably don't have enough juice to run the editor. Apart from that the RPI does not use an x86 architecture since it runs on an ARM processor like most android smartphones. The Unity editor has a lot of native code libraries which most likely won't run on that hardware at all.
While there seem to be windows builds that are for the ARM architecture, I read an article where they managed to install and boot windows on an RPI4. However they said opening a context menu could take up to 10 seconds. Opening a browser up to several $$anonymous$$utes. So it was just a case study if it works, however it's not useable. The Unity Editor has a quite high performance demand. So I would say with quite some confidence that you can not run the Unity Editor on a Raspberry Pi anytime soon. Maybe if they come up with more powerful models in the future, however there are many other roadblocks and the architecture is probably the biggest one. Unity only has 3 versions of the Unity editor: Windows, Mac and Linux.
So using the RPI for game development with Unity is very very unlikely for countless of reasons ^^. So buying a Raspberry Pi just for that is most likely a waste of time and money.
You know what, now I know all that I wanted to know. Well, thank you really very much for finally giving me the answer which I had been looking for quite a while.
Thank You!
