New to Unity. Need a mac to run it.

I’ve been looking at mac’s to run Unity on, and I’ve seen the minimum requirements, but these are usually bare minimum. I want something a little better than 500 MHz, and figure that 1Ghz should be good. What I really want to know is what you would recommend for ram and a video card? Most of the macs I find in my price range of about $300 are around 1ghz, 512+mb ram, and 32MB GPU.

I found a notebook with these settings for $300 and was wondering if it was good to run the Unity Engine.

1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 processor; 512K level 2 cache
1 GB of DDR SDRAM; supports up to 1.5GB
120 GB Ultra ATA hard drive
DVD±R/CD-RW SuperDrive + Slot-Loading SuperDrive
14.1 inch (diagonal) TFT active-matrix XGA color display
ATI Mobility Radeon 9550 with 32MB of video memory

or should I go with a desktop since they will have much more Video memory?

I pretty much just want to do the Unity platformer and FPS tutorials on this website.

The main problem with that machine would be the processor (IMO). 1.42GHz G4 is really slow, and it won’t be very long until apps either stop supporting or have problems supporting (bugs, etc) PowerPC chips. Unity uses CPU power often (compiling scripts comes to mind) and you’ll probably feel it pretty hard.

That’s actually a pretty good machine for $300 - certainly a better deal than any laptop you’ll find new for that price, like the eee pc, and you probably won’t find anything better even used without raising your price range - but I’m not sure I would recommend it for Unity. Maybe someone here who uses Unity on a PowerPC can give a different perspective, but IMO it’s just too slow.

Another new Unity user posed the same question so read through this thread:

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=8895

It’s not THAT slow. I have a 2.5GHz G5, which is probably 2-3X as fast for general things. I could see using Unity at 2-3X slower than what I’m used to…when you get up to a couple thousand lines of code or so, compiling would start to get annoying, but other than that it should be OK. For $300 it’s a really good deal. I wouldn’t use it as a permanent Unity dev machine, but for starting out, that’s hard to beat.

If someone states a budget of $300, probably don’t try to upsell to a Mac Pro or something. :wink:

–Eric

You need more video memory! When you want to use bumping, image effects
and more frames per second, you should buy a mac with 2Ghz, 1 gb of RAM
and a larger display… :?

I brought a Mac specificly for Unity. (On a budget) Had to buy a Mac Mini as I wasnt allowed another machine/monitor/keyboard in the spare room.

Have a simple KVM setup with main PC and Mac Mini, kept her indoors happy in the process as the Mac Mini is no bigger than my router and every thing else is shared. (Use the Mac keyboard for PC also as is nicer)

The spec is as follows:

1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo
512 MB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Mac OS 10.4.10

I am delighted with the performance running Unity, the Tropical Demo runs like a dream in the editor, my current project, which is pretty complex also runs perfectly. In fact every project I’ve tried runs without any performance problems at all.

I would say this spec is more than adequet for developing pretty complex projects using Unity.

Theres nothing wrong with the cpu, but the 32mb video memory will be a bottleneck. Depends on the type of game you want to make.

AC

Take the $300 and add a little more to make the price of a brand spankin new Mac Mini. You can use all of your current peripherals with it and it will have plenty of power to push Unity. They are surprisingly fast and only cost around $500.