[dogles]

The two most popular engines (Unity and Unreal) both have a GC for “front end” gameplay code. The trade-offs are real: manual resource management would be incredibly complex for large modern games (think open world, multiplayer), but GC spikes are a common issue in both engines.

The places where you generally don’t want a GC are with low level engine code, like the renderer - code that might execute hundreds or thousands of times a frame, where things like data locality become paramount. GC does you zero favors there.