Sorry if this is a wrong forum. I’m building a new desktop primarily for Unity development and Blender. I develop for mobile, so no hugely realistic graphics for now.
Should I buy an expensive power-hungry graphics card, or something around $100 will work as well? Any specific recommendations are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Will an expensive graphics card greatly speed up Unity builds?
Same question about CPU. i5, i7, Xeon?
Unity builds are CPU bound (AFAIK), so a GPU isn’t going to help you much for that purpose. For Enlighten again a good CPU and plenty of RAM, for the actual game well that’s up to you and what you’re developing.
As you’ve asked about CPU as well, I’d recommend an I7 if you can. I’m pretty sure it’s down to me being impatient, if I had to sit through the sheer painful amounts of baking / pre-cache times I’d explode from coffee consumption.
You can go the iPhone route, and mindlessly play bejewelled clones while you wait for builds to complete.
I wonder if 32GB vs 16GB RAM would make a big difference in build speeds.
High spec everything will make some part of your pipeline faster. The biggest differences will be made by eliminating bottle necks.
And of course it will vary project to project.
That paints such a disturbing mental picture…
Ram isn’t exactly speed, but more can be open at once. Would have have any effect on the pipeline? Like you save a few clock cycles because instead of closing blender after exporting your files, unity just opens the next program because you have the RAM for it? haha
Oh and if you try to edit a HUGE file that would ordinarily crash the editor, you will be able to keep going while memory leak warnings start popping up in the console.
I was taught at some years ago that the biggest bottleneck in computers now (now being 5 years ago) is the width of the bus between components on the motherboard.
Yes, that’s true, but I don’t want to spend $$$ to save 10% of build time. There has to be a threshold of diminishing returns where it just doesn’t make sense to spend more money on hardware that will become obsolete in a few years anyway.
Not quite TOMMMNNN my old chum, when lightmapping / caching etc. it dumps everything into RAM UE4 is notorious for things like this. I’m guessing here but Enlightens pre-cache and baking is probably no different, so it should speed up certain functionality if you have more RAM to hand off to.
I thought we were talking about speed as in going faster rather than simply not slowing down, my bad 
More RAM prevents a slow down when you cache / load a bajillion bits of data, but RAM alone won’t raise your flops! Besides maybe x64 being aware of how much RAM you have and storing more instructions in memory, saving a few clock cycles on fetching new instructions 
But I know nothing of lighting thus I concede.
Well it’s all about feeding speed, a CPU looks to RAM to quickly access components that have been pre-loaded when needed. If you look at a CPU spec sheet like one linked below, there is a maximum amount of RAM and it’ll specify RAM type at a certain frequency and a maximum amount of bandwidth:
http://ark.intel.com/products/80807/Intel-Core-i7-4790K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_40-GHz
Because at some point the CPU becomes the bottleneck when RAM can feed more information than the CPU can process.
BUT! As always it depends on what you’re doing:
From what I remember of the inner workings (not sure if this applies to Unity and Enlighten today), if you use Enlighten as a realtime solution, radiosity is mapped (updated) to the CPU and direct lighting / composition is GPU bound. Lightmaps and lightprobes are initially updated on the CPU and then there is a geometry pass to a separate G-buffer where the bounce light is added? Well something along those lines…
Anyway, in short. Get the best you can across the board…
For mobile old desktop/average laptop is enough.
If you want to do an upgrade however go for processor + ram.
As far as your CPU is fast where it can use up all that RAM, sure it will! 