id Tech 4 and Unity 3D are rather different technologies from UE2.5-3. Comparing between these three engines running identical hardware, Unreal Engine 3 is going to invariably be slower than id Tech 4... Not necessarily "worse".

Don't get me wrong, I personally hate the Unreal Engine and have hated it since 1997, but what I was really trying to say was "a game engine written X years ago is going to run faster than game engine Y written yesterday." Get what I mean?

Not necessarily. An engine written with the proper optimizations could be designed to run faster than an older engine on the same hardware. Using technologies such as CUDA or OpenCL allows you to take some of the work off of the CPU and place it on the GPU. id Tech 4 games like DOOM 3 don't support GPGPU functionality while newer engines such as UE3/4 or CryENGINE 3 do.

And UE3 isn't slower because its newer, its slower because it requires better hardware than what is required for older (or lower-end) game engines. UE3/4 and CryENGINE 3 belong in a different class from id Tech 4 or Unity3D. both UE3/4 and CryENGINE 3 are designed to push the limits of modern computer hardware, while id Tech 4 and Unity3D are designed to run on current and older hardware.

Comparing UE3/4 with id Tech 4 is like comparing Battlefield 3 with Battlefield 1942 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 with Call of Duty 1. They are designed for different hardware generations. I'm sure if you pumped UE3 level 3D models into id Tech 4 it would run even slower than UE3 itself because it wasn't designed to handle 3D models of such high detail.

I've had the pleasure of working with all four engines (UE3, CryENGINE 3, Unity3D, and id Tech 4) at one time or another and can say this: "Each engine has its own strengths and weaknesses. Depending on where you want you game to be strong depends on the engine you should choose."

Hardly true at all. bla bla bla

Every word of what I wrote is true. I'm not even sure what you are arguing with? Because I did't post anything about engines and their speeds. This is a thread about how someone new should proceed.

If someone wants to make a game, they should go grab an engine, learn to use it, and start putting in their content. There is no need to waste time learning to program D3D or OpenGL if your goal is to make a game. I'm sure his game idea isn't a rotating, normal mapped, teapot or Standford Bunny. Rendering behavior has become pretty standardized and there is no need to go fooling around with all those low level calls. Barring a graphical feature or two (which amount to useless niggling), your content will look like whatever the artist came up with.

Now for the rest of that crap you prattled on about.

A lot of old OpenGL games certain DON'T run better on newer hardware. Especially when they can't find all the outdated extension strings they are looking for, and switch to software fall backs, or worse rendering techniques.

For instance, my newer PC in 2007 with a newer geforce couldn't run Quake2 anywhere near as good as my old machine with a Riva TNT2 in it. One start-up the console would scroll past a huge list of missing extensions, one of which was an old multi-texturing one. So now the game was doing multiple passes over every frame, and I was struggling with it at 800x600.