How does Unity fare on laptops?

News & General Discussion
1

I’ve been looking at laptops for game development, but I was curious how well Unity works on integrated cards and nvidia mobile cards.

The one I’m currently looking at is:
Lenovo ThinkPad T420 4178-6VU with 2nd generation Intel Core i5-2520M @ 2.50GHz, 4GB DDR3, and 1GB NVIDIA NVS 4200M

Has anyone here had much luck with mobile cards or integrated graphics and Unity’s IDE or Unity games? As far as I can tell it meets the minimum requirements, but the requirements don’t say anything about shared memory (Integrated cards) or mobile cards in general.

2

Unity works just fine.Its more about the game you are building…

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3

Yeah what BF said.

I’m using a laptop and it works great, but I’m making a light mobile game.

Unity could make anything though, but it’s just a matter of horsepower.

So if you’re looking to do Elderscrolls 6, most likely a desktop is the way to go.

That, or you could thin client Unity from a desktop to a laptop, but you’d need to be on the desktop’s wireless network, so no cafe’s.

4

Most games you’ll make by yourself or in a small group => perfectly fine
A huge project from a company => melted the charger on my last laptop

5

With 4GB of ram, the editor will run out of memory on larger projects, and start to get really slow/ generate errors. However, smaller projects should work fine. I believe the T420 can be upgraded to 16GB. I think you should do that first thing.

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6

I’m running Unity on an older HP Dv7. I’m also sitting at only 4GB RAM.
And while it is not the best performance, it is doing well for my learning purpose.

7

With 8GB of ram, a friend of mine’s laptop crashed when loading a huuuuge image into the sprite slicer thing. When I opened it on my laptop with 16GB of ram, the editor froze for a moment, the console printed out a warning / error about a memory leak for large textures, then the sprite slicer opened up fine.

8

I occasionally use a laptop with the same exact i5 processor, except with 8GB RAM, and Optimus graphics (Intel HD 3000 / NVIDIA Ge Force610M - ~1400x900 resolution).

Viking Village obviously didn’t work, but the laptop works very well with all of the Unity Samples Assets demos. A $200 SSD drive made a big difference, I was even able to demo the UE4 editor (very resource intensive) under limited settings.

9

Now that is impressive.

10

Assuming a laptop is reasonably modern, then it will probably deliver enough performance to run the Unity editor. The bigger problem with using a laptop is the touchpad. Some functions in the Unity editor benefit from the mouse’s scroll wheel, so you will probably want to have an external mouse. I do not recommend using the laptop’s touchpad with Unity.

The other issue I have with laptops is the lack of screens. With a good desktop system, you can easily connect multiple monitors. That makes it really easy to work efficiently. Most laptops are going to use only the screen built into the laptop. There are developers successfully making games using only a laptop, though.