I started a couple of weeks ago with Unity. I’m doing it with a relatively old laptop (from 2015), that has good enough specs to run VS and Unity, however it does have more hiccups than desirable. Syncing whenever I change a script takes 15-20 seconds and when the number of scripts and the amount of lines start getting big (over 500 lines) performance slows down nd tales even longer. Also playing what I have done for testing is almost always below 30fps whenever I start putting lots of elements in the scene.
I expected low performance due to the age of the laptop but I’m now wondering if everything I’m experiencing is normal or if an upgrade could be worth in my case.
My specs are as follows:
CPU: Hewlett-Packard with Intel(R) Core™ i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz (2 cores)
System: Windows 10
RAM: 6,0 GB DDR3
SSD: TOSHIBA MQ01ABD075 - 699 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 820M - 2,0GB
No. It’s not at all optimal. A good machine for game development should have at least 16GB RAM. Unity will work with a low number of cores but the cores have to be fast ones and that CPU simply isn’t fast. The GPU isn’t any better. If I’m not mistaken it’s slower than modern integrated graphics.
Thanks for the quick response. I was more or less afraid of this but you confirmed my suspicions. Luckily my birthday is near and I could treat myself to a self gift and upgrade my laptop. Time for doing some googling.
Just a last question if is not much of a hassle (I have seen many other responses from you in laptop related threads I have seen using the search bar and you seem knowledgeable on the subject). What would be a recommended CPU/GPU in your opinion? Price in principle isn’t an issue, but knowing a recommended spec beforehand I could make a better informed decission.
If we were discussing desktops it would be easy to discuss individual parts but with laptops it’s not really feasible as it’s entirely possible within the realm of laptops to have two identically specced models function differently. I’ll link the laptop that I recommend to people that need a dedicated GPU.
You can often upgrade memory on laptops. It might give you some more life. You should also make sure you have sufficient hard drive space for a large paging file.
I have a Ryzen nitro 5 with RX 560X laptop which I upgraded to have 16GB RAM and extended SSD storage. Its pretty much low-mid end but handles enterprise sized AEC projects (And our projects are massive) really well with unity.
So RAM and CPU really are your bottleneck here, RAM being the foremost. Before I upgraded the laptop to 16GB RAM, everything was slow including windows, once I added that it was night and day difference.
If you can go higher than low-mid spec, then ofcourse go for a higher model CPU and a better GPU, but RAM should be the first stop.
Its often better to get a new low-mid end laptop than to use an old “high” end laptop as the age kicks in fast for this sort of thing - hardware gets drastically stronger over the years and what was high end will become super low end fast.
Thanks a lot for the recommendation. That looks really great and is really helpful to compare any other laptop I might look at.
Thanks for this as I was precisely looking at older laptops and seeing if upgrading could be an option.
Anyway, I have also found the following link googling around: https://gamefromscratch.com/choosing-a-portable-game-development-laptop/
It’s from 2015 and obviously outdated but the thought process and the concepts seem to still appy, so I’ll leave it here in case someone else stumbles upon this thread. I found the following specially useful:
Toshiba MQ01ABD075 is an HDD, not SSD. Significant performance difference for Unity. HDD’s are terrible at dealing with large numbers of small files, reading and writing to them seemingly at random, but take a look at a project Library folder some time. It is basically an HDD worst case scenario.
Today you want minimum of 4 cores with a reasonably modern CPU architecture, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD with sufficient space. I’d recommend 1TB because projects can take up a lot of space, and if you use Unity long enough you’ll easily end up with half a dozen or more versions installed, but if you don’t do much else you can get by with less.
You always want to get more SSD space than you actually need because of how SSD wear leveling and caching algorithms use the free space. The locations where data is stored on an SSD have a limited number of writes they can tolerate. SSD’s in the background use the free space on the drive to move data around to make writes to the drive more uniform, so you don’t have one part of the SSD fail significantly earlier than expected, and if done correctly the SSD will usually outlive its usefulness to you before it flips to read only from too many writes.
But if you get close to filling up the drive, the wear leveling algorithm can’t do its job efficiently. From the user perspective, you’ll see poor performance, but behind the scene the drive is struggling to shuffle all the data around with a small area to work with.
Some SSD’s also use part of the drive’s free space as a high speed cache, using the free space in a less space efficient but more speed efficient manner. If the drive is full, you have no high speed cache, so write performance drops significantly
GPU requirements just come down to the project, and if you need functionality like GPU based lightmap baking. If you get a pretty modern CPU, the integrated graphics will be good enough for most projects otherwise (even if graphics performance remains on the low end).
All the recommendations here are sound. Is weight of the laptop a big issue? If not, basically getting any proper gaming laptop will solve your problems?
Eg, everything here probably meets your requirements, just remember to get at least 1TB of SSD as mentioned as unity projects do get huge.
What Joe said is super correct with regards to the GPU. For my 3D/VR projects i use a system with a dedicated GPU (just a 1660), but for all my 2D projects I just use a laptop with just integrated graphics and it works just fine (Dell XPS 13), even for larger projects.
Do check out actual reviews of the systems you are interested in to see if there are any other issues such as overheating, especially with the thinner/more portable systems
Also, some last note is that do remember to test built versions of your project (not just click play in the editor) as the performance can differ significantly, and do remember to do optimizations as well rather then just power through with brute force, eg, just because your project runs fine i9 32gb 2080 system, doesn’t mean all your users have such a specification.
If your doing lightmaps a good GPU can be nice too. We have a intern right now he works from his home on a desktop with a GTX 1060 and his job right now is going over some of our assets and create custom UV2. And on some of the more complex assets there is some try and error needed to get perfect results. He was sharing his screen and I almost got an heartattack from the waittimes when PLM was working.
Wow. I got WAY more help than I actually expected. Thanks a lot, guys. For now I’m mostly interested in doing semi-simple 2D stuff but I don’t want to limit my possibilities for the future so any of the around 1000€ laptops I have found through this thread seem like a good choice. Also maybe Laptop General
I think it’s genuine. Gamedev still has that stigma of “dude you need the ultimate computer to make your games!” and not everyone cares that much about what hardware they have (yes, i know, that’s not a very good thing).
Absolutely. Not sure about how good Quadro Max-Q cards are in comparison to their desktop counterparts (both NVIDIA and AMD GPU lineups have become a bit confusing (to say the very least)) but it should be enough to open Unity .
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