Alright, so I’ve been salivating over Unity since I tried it on my friend’s Mac, and the very friendly developers here are probably tired of my e-mails asking questions about compatible machines.
I’ve been contemplating getting a mac mini for unity development, but I’m really iffy about the power of this machine.
If any of you Mac gurus could give me a hint here- I do my production work currently on a Windows PC:
AMD 64 3200- 2.2 Ghz
1.0 GB Ram
NVidia QuadroFX 1100
The goal here is to continue doing all my graphics work on PC and obviously Unity on the Mac. SO:
What’s an equivilant Mac machine to this one in terms of power/speed/graphics?
What’s it gonna cost me?
(Taumel might know something about this I’m thinking)
Thanks guys!
Hello,
Not comparing to AMD, but for Unity dev. macmini intel core duo is pretty good. there’s a lot of benchmark about macmini and seems like the integrated intel graphics chips is holding up.
I use a G5 dual 2.0 with a stock graphics card(Nvidia 64 MB, I think).
Unity will be UB very soon.
Ray
I think it really depends on what you want to do. I thought I could get away with development on my G4 tower even though I would publish with much higher system requirements, and well I cant. Most importantly I have been limited with my graphics card (Radeon 9200). I think that a mac mini can be used for development of a small indie cutesy game. (I like small indie cutesy games!) But based on the fact that my G4 towers specs are almost the same of the mac mini’s it would be very tough to make really cool graphics and use these awesome shader tools.
I keep finding my self making high poly things and having to down res them to play better on my card same goes for textures. This is obviously one of the realities of real time 3D graphics but I want more then my current system can give me. In some cases I cant even do things on my graphics card such as Cg vertex programs (it’s hard to learn Cg when you cant actually test it on your card). I am probably going to get a MacBook soon and one of the reasons why is becuase I dont feel I can take my game ideas and art and use them to there full potential on my current machine.
Picking a machine to use for development im sure is hard, and I dont want to make it harder 
but I wouldnt go with a mini. I think you should plan for the future, buying a mini while cheap and nice now will be very cheap and not so nice later. Im not saying buy a quad G5 just so you can stay on top longer but you should think about what you want to do and the future of what you might want to do. After learning all of unitys wonders and how easy it is to use you might decide you want to go big and it would be a bummer to be regretting that you bought the lowest thing on the food chain.
Thats my two cents :roll:
Bill
I would recommend the iMac core duo. The 17" version is $1299, and includes everything you need (X1600 graphics, high quality wide screen display, keyboard, mouse, etc).
I believe Amazon offer a rebate as well, so you’d probably end up paying $1150 for it. It’s a fantastic machine, very fast.
And thanks to its graphics card and the high performance yet low power Intel Core Duo processor, it is well suited for gaming. It’s also easy to pop in more RAM, so for example you could buy an extra 1GB module from a third party for about $100, and pop it in. 
Thanks for all the tips.
I’m continuing to mull over the different engines I’ve played with and weighed my options.
If Unity was on PC, I’d be there in a heartbeat. It’s a clear winner in terms of the software itself.
Since the Indie version doesn’t publish to PC though, a non-Mac person is looking at least a 2300 dollar investment to develop for Windows.
I third the core duo iMac recommendation. If it works for Widgetmonkeys …
But as you noted, I’d maybe start out with a new machine and the indie license. You can always upgrade to pro later during your development cycle and not have that extra $700 or so at the beginning.