Hi there,
what are the benefits to use Windows over Mac for game-development with Unity?
I’m using a Mac Pro 2009 with upgraded LogicBoard (Motherboard) to 2012 with 2x 3.46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon, 32 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB.
In before the flamewar.
Over that system? Nothing. It’s exactly the same as a similar custom Windows system, disregarding OS preferences.
Ok, so there are no graphically benefits if I’m using Windows? Such as DirectX or tessellation? Can I see that also on my Mac?
Tesselation is among the supported features:
Compute shaders are notably not, but you might be able to survive without them 
DirectX is Windows only, of course. The features are referred to as Shader Model 5.0, which is common to DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan.
Ah ok, thank you
Ok, I’ve to ask it again because of some things that seems not to change in the near future:
All this things are only possible if I would use a Windows-Machine, right?
A virtual Windows with VMWare Fusion wouldn’t be enough to get these things running on my Mac (look in my first post above for technical data)?
Thank you!!
With Windows, you get the advantage of picking your hardware. You do have very nice specs (see my signature for my specs), however some platforms require the Windows OS (Hololens for instance). For Hololens, you’re required to have Windows 10 Pro.
Also, on Windows 10 you get Directx 12, which gives much better performance than older versions. You can look online and see that with Windows and Mac computers with close-to-same specs, Windows always has more FPS. Most people (especially gamers) use Windows, so developers and Microsoft optimize their software for Windows.
So good news is, you won’t have to buy a PC, you can just get Windows 10 Pro (Home won’t work for Hololens) and dual-boot it. That way, you can boot to Windows or to OSX. Also there’s Bootcamp, but I’m not a Mac guy so I’m not so sure how that works.
I think you’ll love Windows 10
I already own Win10 Pro and I use it in a virtual machine, because I’m using a SoftRAID (with a TempoSSD Pro) and it’s not possible to boot into other “drives”. So if I decide to use dual-boot on my Mac, I’ve to remove the RAID-Card and I would lost about 300MB/sec speed on my SSD drives. This wouldn’t be the coolest thing ^^
I could switch the TempoSSD Pro to a normal TempoSSD (single drive), which means I would “only” lost around 150MB/sec speed and could boot dual.
But the real bad thing about it is the work-flow, because all of my other stuff is on my Mac, so I’ve already to reboot between the systems.
Or would you say it’s senseless to use a Mac for professional game-development and I should start to switch my things to Windows and use dual-boot for the first time (to switch to macOS for the things I didn’t switch yet) and later I only boot into Windows until I bought a new Windows-PC (if it’s needed later)?
What about iOS-Development? Do I need macOS for it, if I’m using Unity CloudBuild?
I also read that it would be possible to use VMWare Fusion/Parallels Desktop combined with Bootcamp/dual-boot (http://kb.parallels.com/en/112941), so I could dual-boot into Windows to test my games in high-speed and use the virtual machine for “normal” work/tests in macOS, while I’m using Unity on macOS all day long!?
Unless it’s changed since I did it you’ll need at least macOS to set it all up. I duel boot and its probably more hassle than its worth. If I had more money I would just buy a mac mini.
@Shizola : So you would say it would be much better to set up my Mac to dual-boot and work on it like it would be a Windows-Machine and only boot back to macOS for iOS-stuff, because it’s much better to develop in Windows only (instead of iOS)?
If you’re developing for platforms other than iOS or MacOS, there is no reason to use MacOS. You could make all your projects in Windows, then if you want a Mac or iOS build, copy it over to MacOS. Since there is no advantage to using MacOS (except building for Apple devices), I’d just work on Windows all the time.
I wish I could help you out with Bootcamp, but all I have is an OSX virtual machine, so it’s safe to say I’m not into Macs.
Yeah I’d say so, but it depends on how often you think you’d be switching back and forth.
Ok, thanks. I think I don’t have to switch to much while I’m developing, because the most stuff I can access through Windows (after switching some software to get cross-platform access, like my ToDo-App, Email, etc) and then I think I can do the most of my stuff in both systems.
BUT the price is slower hard-drives, because the Mac Pro only has SATA-2 and I can’t use my SATA-3 any longer because dual-boot would work. That’s bad to get down from 900MB/sec to around 300MB/sec -.-
But this way is much much more cheaper instead of buying a new PC to replace the Mac for now.