Multi-cores

Does anyone here have a 6-core or 8-core machine? I’m curious as to how faster Unity compiles, creates lightmaps, crunches textures etc.

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Hi Nihil. I am running Unity Pro on a i7, but don’t see any real benefit from hyperthreading or even having four cores. I’ve posted here asking for advice on designing a custom system to run Unity, with no answers. This is not typical. People here are very friendly and helpful, so I suspect no one really knows the answer.

I spend ten to fifteen hours daily working in Unity, and need a dedicated machine. We just wiped the C Drive on my main i7 system and did a full reinstall with the minimum number of apps I need for my work besides Unity. The speed up was amazing, so now I am building a dedicated system ONLY for Unity, Blender and Photoshop.

I am leaning toward building a new system around an i5 chipset, as my CTO reviewed Unity and doesn’t believe there is any benefit to using an i7 over an i5.

I have a dual core workstation set up now and am going to install Unity on it this evening and do a comparison between a dual core Pentium and my i7. My gut feeling is Unity may run just as well on a dedicated fast Pentium or i3 with a lot of ram, SSD drive, videocard, etc. as on an i7, which means I can build a new dedicated system for a fraction of the cost of another i7 monster.

I’ll let you know what I discover. But, like I said, my CTO sees no benefit at all in upgrading to a six or eight core system.

Hi Nihil,

I hunted this website for a basic system recomendation from Unity and never found one.

We had a spirited discussion tonight between my tech guys and myself. They shot down my dual core idea as underpowered and too limited for expansion.

The consensus was no value in six or eight cores and i7s are not worth the extra expense on a dedicated Unity machine.

i5 is the best chipset for Unity. I am getting a 6600 i5, an Asus motherboard, 16 GB Corsair DDR4 RAM in 8 GB sticks, so I can upgrade to 32 if needed just by buying 2 more stricks, and an older generation DDR5 2 GB EVGA video card (big price difference compared to the new 900 and 300 series, respectively).

Components for my new system are being prepared for order from New Egg now.

Unless somerone more experienced in UNity than my team weighs in here, this is where we are at. Hope it helps.

SSD and i7 offer the biggest gains we’ve found. The SSD really helps. For baking, only some parts go wide, so there’s a lot of single core then multi core etc, so yes, more cores help, but an SSD might help more.

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We currently have very strong systems, we’re just looking whether to double the quad-cores we have or upgrade the new machines to 6/8 core systems. We are using SSDs at the moment but in big projects it’s taking a while longer. We’re happy with even 10% quicker times but we just want to know if there is a difference and if possible roughly how much

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Thank you, HippoCoder. I am grateful for the input of a far more experienced person, both for Nihil’s benefit and my own.

I forgot to mention they made the decision to upgrade all our systems to SSD C Drives - whether they run Unity or not. The cost is so low there is no compelling reason not to do so.

I think I will still go with the i5, though. This is a temporary system to speed up production until we meet investor benchmarks. After that cost will no lomger be a compelling factor in the buying decision.

Unity is getting progressively more threaded each patch though, so your call.

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@hippocoder Since DX12 is going to be the main setup, multithreadedness is a must so more cores will definitely be more worth it in the long run, my current worry is by how much.

If anyone out there stumbles upon this post and happens to have a 6/8 core, we can setup some benchmark to see the results.

= )

@Nihil688
It’s my understanding they’re talking about editor time. Compilation, building, lightmap baking. SSD + multi threading really helps. An i5 kind of sucks next to an i7 for some parts. I also have it on good accord Unity are always improving this part, so not just game builds.

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