The classic framing of “C++ native beats Lua/C# because no GC” is too blunt—what actually hurts in a competitive title is frame-time variance, not average latency. Lua’s incremental collector is clever on paper, but during heavy spawn events (round res, ability spam, particle bursts) you still see those 3-5ms hitches when the collector crosses a major threshold, and at 240Hz that’s the difference between a clean frame and a dropped one. C# isn’t as bad as it was five years ago—Unity’s new GC-free allocator, pooled allocators, and SOOC (single object, single allocation) discipline basically eliminate the pause spikes if you’re disciplined about not allocating in hot paths. The real killer is untracked heap allocation in update loops; once you profile with RenderDoc or a CPU allocator stats view, you’ll find 80% of GC pressure comes from a handful of string concatenations and LINQ calls nobody remembers writing.
For next-gen architecture, the industry is clearly moving toward arena/zone-based allocators and object pooling baked into the scripting layer itself—look at how Bevy and Rust-based engines are pushing unmanaged, cache-friendly ECS data layouts that sidestep GC entirely, plus the resurgence of hand-rolled memory pools that pre-reserve scratch space per frame. If you’re tuning a current title, my advice is pragmatic: lock your hot scripting paths to a fixed-size pool
"System Specs:"
"CPU: Ryzen 5 7600X"
"GPU: RX 7900 XTX"
"* Monitor: ASUS PG248QP 540Hz"
