I’m making a Unity game to be run on one PC for an exhibit.
What video card and hardware is the best to run the game? Within reason, I’m not talking about $7000 video cards and WOPR supercomputers.
The monitor will be Planar Bobcat X 40" 1366 x 768.
depends on the game
on a shader heavy one a new 8800GT, 9800GT, 9800GX2 or HD3870 should be more than enough
An 8800GT is more than enough to run 1366x768.
If you’re buying an entirely new machine you can get a cheap Dell quad core ($500) + 8800GT ($150), assuming Windows suits your needs.
As I understand it, nVidia has run into problems because the 8800GT (now selling for cheap) runs so well that their more modern cards don’t really do much better than it. Even ATI’s brand new 3870 only barely outperforms the 8800 in some tests. (And you’re not going to care unless you’re running Crysis at high resolutions.)
Per the other discussion about multicore, a dual core CPU is all that Unity really takes advantage of, perhaps unless you are manually threading a lot of stuff in your game. So a top-speed CPU would be better than a bunch of cores.
You will want the max possible VRAM for the video card – 512 MB – to be able to run at large screen resolutions and have big textures.
And you will also want plenty of physical RAM – 2 GB or more if you have a lot of high quality textures and lots of models in the runtime.