Laptop spec for Unity usage?

Hi.

I am now thinking to change my laptop.

So I am currently using Sony Vaio Pro13, stressed a lot by low -U cpu and low graphic power. Its nearly impossible to deal with serious 3d game develop via Unity.

So I am thinking to change at least i7 skylake cpu, over 8 g ram, choice issue is graphic card.

Between Geforce 960m, 970m, 980m

I don’t do gaming much, so gaming is not option. But I realized 3d game develop also require powerful graphic card.

Of course 980m is best, 970m second, but always price is problem.

So core questions are,

1.960m is enough for unity? or at least 970m required?

  1. 8G ram is enough? or at least 16G ram required?

  2. Skylake i7-6700hq or i7-6820hk?

Thanks.

My surface pro does just fine for most things :smile: Just make sure you get an SSD and at least 8GB ram. I would also suggest keeping a decent desktop - most laptops have really lousy graphics options that don’t scale unless you’re buying something top-of-the-line, but then you’re almost carrying a desktop with an inbuilt screen around anyway. Heavy laptops are not fun!

I got a pretty fast laptop and it just doesn’t cut it for game dev. I recommend getting a desktop. My desktop of the same price (and 3 years older) runs Unity about 3 times as fast.

If you’re not writing much code, it may be ok. Compile times suffer the most. I do have 8GB ram, quad-core I-7. Don’t have SSD on the laptop, but neither am I using the SSD on my desktop.

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People often overestimate how much hardware power you NEED for gaming and game development.

It all comes down to how high quality graphics you want to have. And in case of developing on Unity, those requirements aren’t that high.

Basically whatever you buy you’ll be good. You can always turn off all the fancy effects while you’re developing/testing on lower end machines, since what really maters is Aesthetics not the Graphics.

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I do over half my development on a cheap laptop. Like Zoran said, I think a lot of people overestimate how powerful your computer needs to be. Mine is pathetic and I have almost the same productivity while using it as my desktop. Unity really isn´t that demanding for normal development. I wouldn´t want to bake a lightmap on it though.

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Intel HD is sufficient for Unity. You only need more if you want fancier visuals.

You only really need 4GB, but having more memory is never a bad thing. Especially for resource intensive processes like light mapping.

Both are very similar. I doubt you’ll see much of a difference outside of resource heavy tasks like light mapping.

The Asus G751JY (4780HQ, M.2 SSD, 32GB RAM, 980M) doesn’t struggle to run UE4 maxed out and everything is quick, the 980M is a beast of a GPU… The issue is I found in laptops, the performance difference between GPU’s models in some instances are huge… Sure the laptop I quoted is maybe a little OTT for Unity, but it sure wouldn’t struggle in the slightest.

Modern laptops (in the last year) or so have come a long way.

Speaking of a beast of a GPU…

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why is this always such a talking point, despite the fact that game development, on Unity anyway, usually isnt demanding on specs.

Depends on what you are developing. Many people only develop mobile games with 2d graphics… Laptop would be no problem. Another person might be making a 3d realistic style open-world multiplayer game with GI. But even in the latter case, you can use a cheap laptop for a huge part of your development.

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Ram is a bit weird because its better to think of it as a pipeline that gets wider and slower as it goes. In the cpu, the registers will each contain binary data that is being acted upon or has been acted upon. These will feed off of and into the caches which are (these days) on the CPU chip and bigger and slower. These in turn will feed to and from the ram which again is bigger and slower and feeds off of your page file on your hard disk. Some applications like after effects will allow you to set up a separate page file just for that application.

This is to allow switching computations between calculating your lighting in game to the operating system reading from the disk to that excel document you have open in the background. Multitasking!! As a general rule of thumb the more ram you have the slower the read/write/seek speeds are. Usually this is more than made up by being able to keep more information sequentially so it can be one solid stream with fewer seeks. Where too much ram can be an issue is when the information is spread out in the dimms or fragmented so there are a lot of seeks slowing you down.

I have a few systems running various configurations and a reasonably big work network and I find it is way more beneficial to have in the region of 8GB (maybe 16 these days) of ram coupled with an SSD hard drive than 32GB of high performance ram and fast spinning rust (old platter hard drives).

Your computer is a system with many many bottlenecks controlled by oscillating clocks that synchronize everything so that no part is sharing information too fast or too slow for the others (indeed if you have 3 sticks of ram and one is slightly slower than the other two all three will be stepped down to the lowest speed).

To create a good machine the idea is to reduce the bottlenecks as much as possible to keep everything flowing as consistently as you can.

Coding is not very demanding on your system, neither is designing in many modeling / texturing packages. Compiling and rendering on the other had - the finalization of your design will be greatly improved by a decent PC.

Another important note is that unless you are running a 64 bit operating system and 64 applications your system can only use the first 4GB - this is down to how much memory they can address. Easier to explain with an example here is how you store numbers in 8 bit notation:

To put it as simply as possible, your OS, using this scheme either has 32 columns or 64 so the range of numbers it can store (relating to positions in memory) increases significantly with each column…

Incidentally this is also why there are 1024 bytes to a kb, 1024 kb to a mb, 1024 md to a gb, etc etc.

Another fine example of binary at work:

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Oh I completely understand that, its just that there seems to be a weekly thread on this.

If I’m being brutally honest, I think a lot of people use their computer as an excuse to not get in and start making games, as in ‘oooh I’d love to start getting some work done, but I need a top of the range pc. Oh well, I’ll wait until Christmas, until then I’ll just watch youtube videos. Oh what a shame’. At the end of the day they’re just kidding themselves, but you know

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Completely agree, but must admit I needed a top end piece of kit or I’d of thrown my laptop out the window… In 3D lightmapping / shader compilation (not in Unity) and engine complilation can take a WHILE!>. I test at at all sorts of resolutions like 4K etc. to test performance across the board.

So I just buy one top of the range piece of kit until the games out (once every three years) then upgrade when working on the next title and min specs have gone up.

I have to to ask though, why does it matter to you if people waste their time?

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As someone who makes money off of YouTube videos I can’t complain too much. :slight_smile:

I’d suggest using Unity on whatever happens to be lying around. Then if you run into performance issues you can spend the money on better kit.

The games I make and the games @ makes require very different specs. An old smartphone would probably be sufficient for me.

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I’ve been using a computer I first built in 2007 (with an Intel Core2 Duo and 8GB RAM) and lightly upgraded over time. All of my games since then, including my latest, have been built on this very old (8 years!) system. I updated the video card in 2011 and that was the last upgrade I did on the machine.

A large number of our game users are on older systems, so developing on an older system helped me make sure every step of the way that we were totally compatible. Plus, I’m usually so busy making game after game that it’s hard to find the time to change out the development box. Always “just one more thing and then I’ll think about upgrading”, and then time passes. Eight years of time. Hah! I don’t usually fix what isn’t broken. The down side to using the old system? Compile times. My god, don’t even ask. So yeah, that needed fixing of course. Badly.

So…This past week, I finally built a brand new system, with SSD, better CPU, 16GB RAM, etc. I’m on it now. Much better. :slight_smile: But… that old beast served me well, and I’ll kind of miss it.

Anyway, point is, you don’t need a super computer to make games in Unity. Just get the best system you can afford at the time you buy it. And, if you’re setting up a desktop, build it yourself. It’s not easy, but you’ll get much better deals, you’ll know exactly what’s in the box, and the satisfaction of putting together the system you use every day is pretty damned awesome.

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This. As for what GPU to get, yeah, it depends on the game you’re making. Any half-decent, recent dedicated GPU will be a great start, and will meet needs for most people. Considering the price premium for going above the 960 in a laptop I probably wouldn’t do it - logic being that the money can be better spent on your next upgrade. Of course if you need the additional performance now then do it.

Another consideration is whether it’s your main development machine or not. I do a lot of development on my 5+ year old laptop. I also have a new, beefy desktop when I need grunt, though, so I get the benefits of portability and power without having (recently) paid a huge premium for gutsy laptop.

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Well for the most part it doesnt, I just like a rant
However, in this case, it kind of does, because the forums get filled with topics about specs

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And why not, it’s not rocket science! http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-todays-spacecraft-still-run-on-1990s-processors/

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This is grand inquisitor orb from the Cult of SSD butting in to say you can get by with any old crap, as long as you can jam an SSD into it.

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