Unity and Dual Xeon Processor Setups

Unity Engine
1

Hi guys,

I have a bit of an decision to make and I’d like some tech input about this!

We are upgrading our dev boxes, since we are moving more into VR games and serious games, that are in turn getting more complex when it comes to visuals and interaction.

Our new boxes must be able to do mainly:

-Run Unity (of course)
-Bake Realtime lightmaps in usefull time (not hours)
-Not to choke with physics
-Run Kinect V2 + Oculus DK2 at the same time
-Run Visual Studio
-Run Several Virtual Machines at once (such as 1 or two VMs, besides the current OS at normal load)
-Run emulators (such as genymotion)
-Run games with high-end graphics (such as Crysis, Star Citizen, Titan Fall, etc.)
-Be a valid workhorse of a PC for the next 3-4 years (at least)

I’ve narrowed down what we need for most of the rigs:

-Dual or Triple graphics setup
-SSD’s
-7.2k or 10k RPM drives
-32 GB RAM
-HUGE power supply

and then we came to the processors…

Currently I’m facing two choices:

-Intel i7 5960X @ 3.5 (turbo)= 8 cores, 16 threads. Pros: Deadly fast, handles it self well, covers most of the spec I’ve mentioned. Cons: Requires DDR4 RAM, which is just a waste of money, since it isn’t faster or better than DDR3, just more expensive :stuck_out_tongue:

  • Dual processor Intel Xeon E5 2620 V3 @ 3.2 (turbo)=12 cores (6x2), 24 threads (12*2). Pros: Many,many,many threads, cheaper than the i7 (buy 2 of these for the price of 1 i7) , practicaly the same performance on single core and I can use DDR3 RAM on it. Cons: a bit slower than the i7 on overal performance, unknown performance when it comes to running games.

Basicaly if the Dual Xeons could perform well with running games and/or if it exists a clear advantage in using dual processors with Unity (bakes?), it would be best choice, since I know it handles the rest pretty well.

As for the i7, I’m sure it would handle all the spec brilliantly, but it’s quite expensive by itself and that DDR4 RAM gimmick only makes the rest of the rig unnecessarly expensive as well.

So, does anyone has experience with using any of these processors? Can anyone tell me if there are any advantages of a dual CPU rig on Unity/game dev?

Thanks in advance!

2

Any ideas anyone?

3

I would think that the xeon is a better choice when it comes to vms

4

Makes sense, I would like to know if the performance gains would be significant, when it comes to rendering operations, such as lightmapping bakes and overal Unity performance.

I’ve read a thread here on the forum where it stated that older Unity versions where single-thread oriented, if that is the case, it would be better to have less cores and higher clock speed.

I would like to know if this is still the case with Unity 5? or is it more “multi-threaded”?

5

Unity is generally single threaded so you can use the unity API like mesh, gameobject etc. only in the main-thread.
The Editor of Unity5 is a little bit different because the baking and nav mesh generation for example is happening in the background.

6

Oh, alright then. Thanks!

I think I’ll be going for the dual Xeons then, I believe that it is a more flexible setup than a single-processor rig for game dev purposes. Plus the life-time of the rig is greatly increased by board and socket spec, so it ends being a future investment as well.

7

Hi RFLG,
How did you manage with the dual Xeon rig build? How does Unity perform with it? More importantly I was wondering about light baking times?
Currently we spend a lot of time baking scenes and if Unity supoorts dual (or quad) processors that would be excellent.

8

Hi jeffries, I’m waiting for the rig to be delivered. Can’t wait to check that too, since we have a couple of projects that are quite bake-intensive. I’ll report back when I have something.

Oh and don’t be shy to bump this up if I don’t report back in a week or so, with all the stuff going on, it might slip my mind altogether :smile:

That way I’ll get a notification to remind me and post the results here :slight_smile:

9

Just bumping the thread to see if you’ve got any updates :slight_smile:

10

Hey! The supplier is missing an processor :\ Got all the other stuff ready, but no rig yet :stuck_out_tongue:

11

@jeffries7 Hey there! It has been a while…but we finally got this thing to work!

Besides the missing processor, we also had a 32GB DDR4 dimm held up in customs for whatever reason :stuck_out_tongue: But now it is running strong and baking like it never baked before :smile:

As for you original question: we are running Unity 5.1.1 and it uses all the cores on both processors, it can even clip them at 100%. It also munches up RAM like a maniac, we’ve managed to see him go up to almost 40GB.

As for baking times, we’ve seen a 2/3 to 3/4 reduction from our previous times, making it viable to work on higher specs and thus getting better end-results.

Let me know you have anymore questions :wink:

12

Thanks for the update :smile:

If you don’t mind me asking, roughly how big are these scenes that you are baking? In polys or tris.
Those time improvements are very impressive, now I just need to convince my boss to invest in a nice shiny rig.

13

Hey there,

About scene size, we running scenes with around 40 Million to 50 Million tris, give or take a million. It still takes a few hours to bake, specially if you are going for 2048 res with high count of final gather rays, but now it is viable to aim at these sizes on production time. If you go for lower resolutions/final gather rays, bake times are way smaller of course.

On game bakes w/low-poly geos we are using realtime baking very smoothly. :wink:

14

@RFLG Hi, what processors are you really using? I know they are more than one, but what is the model of those processors? And what mother board? Can I know the full configuration? I want to build a REAL BEAST. Im thinking 4 processors. I need to know about your experience with more than one processors so that I can make a right decision …

15

Dual processor Intel Xeon E5 2620 V3 @ 3.2 (turbo)=12 cores (6x2), 24 threads (12*2). I don’t recall the board model though.