Unity and multiple CPU cores

[cecarlsen]

Does Unity take advantage of the extra cores in, lets say, a Mac Pro Quad-Core Intel Xeon?

If not, is the functionality planed to be integrated in future versions?

~ce

[cecarlsen]

Sorry I didn’t find the thread at first, but now I see that the issue has already been discussed

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=11660

Aras says:

Right now in Unity we don’t have a lot of things multithreaded; there are separate threads for audio streaming, network, WWW downloads; the graphics driver often runs partly on another thread; same with sound backend, etc. At this moment though, most of those additional threads do comparatively small amount of work, that’s why you usually see single core utilized more than the others. Of course we plan to use multiple threads for more things in the future.

[cecarlsen]

In practice, does this mean that a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with additional NVIDIA GeForce 8800 512MB ($1,949) runs Unity approximately the same speed as a standard Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro ($2,799)?

I’d like to know, because Im about to hit the BUY botton.

~ce

[Dreamora]

depends on the graphic card. For the CPU side it makes no difference at all, a dualcore, even if it is able to use the cores better, will still be plenty and what you should target your game at (don’t forget, your target users definitely will NOT have 8 cores. there are no desktop boards for windows with dual socket setup)

[anon_38981616]

Most games currently don’t take advantage of multiple CPU cores, but there is ongoing research on how to better exploit them for certain game tasks.

BTW, dreamora, there are several dual socket boards out there for Windows systems. Dual socket AMD opteron server boards exist and the newest Intel “Skulltrail” has dual Xeon processors (8-core) much like the Mac Pro:

Not Found: 404 Error

[jashan]

@""

In practice, does this mean that a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with additional NVIDIA GeForce 8800 512MB ($1,949) runs Unity approximately the same speed as a standard Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro ($2,799)?

I’d like to know, because Im about to hit the BUY botton.

It really depends on what you’re doing. I’m very happy I have a quad-core Mac Pro (and definitely could use an eight-core Mac Pro just as well). Reason is: I have a virtual machine open running Windows with Visual Studio, and more important: this also runs SQL Server 2005 to which my game server connects to. I have Unity open, of course (I’ll not talk about “the big sin” now ). And then, I sometimes have up to 12 instances of my game open (on that single machine) simulating many clients for my multiplayer game.

So: If you do multiplayer game development, a multi-processor machine will be very nice. If you like to have Windows on your Mac, it also doesn’t hurt (even though I don’t really think that makes so much difference - unless you have a database running that you access from your game server).

Even though Unity may not support multi-processor / multi-core on its own, the way you use it might

Oh, and of course: That means that Gigs of RAM are very nice, too. But when you hit the BUY button, unless things have changed since a year ago - DO NOT have a lot of Apple’s ultra-expensive RAM in the shopping cart. Apple RAM is not a good choice (more a waste of money). There’s alternatives that may cost you half or even less (with - AFAICS - the same quality).

Sunny regards,
Jashan

[Dreamora]

@""

BTW, dreamora, there are several dual socket boards out there for Windows systems. Dual socket AMD opteron server boards exist and the newest Intel “Skulltrail” has dual Xeon processors (8-core) much like the Mac Pro:
Not Found: 404 Error

What I meant is:
XEON / ECC → no desktop board but a server board at best used in Workstations.
Desktop processors are Core2Duo / Quad and use non-ECC.

[cecarlsen]

Thanks for the quick replies everyone.

It really depends on what you’re doing.

The only purpose for the machine is to run a single instance of my Unity “game”.
It’s a data visualisation project for a contemporary art museum.

Some of my former classmates successfully build a killer windows machine for a similar purpose (very cheep and insanely fast), but I need something that is absolutely stable. According to the information I have gathered, I think, I should go for an iMac upgraded with NVIDIA GeForce 8800, possibly with extra memory (bought somewhere else than the Apple store, thanks for the tip).

~ce