Just writing as I have seen in some past forums that a Macbook is fine for development with Unity, but I am using a
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015,
2.7 GHz Intel Core i5
with 8gb ram and it is just painful - and is newer so I can’t replace the RAM.
I click on a scene to do some work, wait 30 seconds. Only half the time can I do flythrough mode with any resemblance of realtime movement.
Just wondering what I am doing wrong to get such terrible lag time. Also wondering if it is due to Perforce as I am remote working on a bigger game, and live in the woods so the internet is pretty slow - 7MBS download speed. So would this be the thing that is the biggest issue?
Looking to get an inexpensive PC for just working in Unity if needed, as the Mac works for all my sound creation needs. I am a sound designer and implementer BTW, so need to get into every facet of Unity to attach sound to things. Any help would be great as I need to get a machine this weekend as my production speed is killing me right now. Any ideas on a decent off the shelf desktop PC? What would I need to make sure a PC would have to run unity well? Have worked in big studios on PCs, but didn’t pay as much attention to the specs, the machines just worked.
Thanks for you time folks
I’m using a Macbook (a newer one now, but I was using a model similar to yours until recently) and performance has been fine. OTOH, in the games I’ve been working on, no single scene is particularly huge. Some questions:
How big are your scenes in terms of number of objects / tris / textures?
Are you running any editor scripts that do significant processing?
What do you mean by remote? Is the entire game present on your HD? Is Perforce automatically downloading/uploading anything while you’re working on it?
If it’s a game targeting higher end hardware than you’ve got then you’re going to have issues. Keep in mind that Unity is only one part of what’s going on. Unity itself will run on a fair range of hardware, but there’s no limit on how much you can weigh it down with whatever you put in it, and your hardware has to be able to handle that as well.
So if you’re making a game targeted at high-end gaming PCs or something like that then you’ll need at least equivalent hardware for development, because to develop you need to run the game and the Editor and potentially a bunch of tools on top or alongside.
Edit: Basically, while working on a game your PC needs to be powerful enough to run an unoptimised version of the game you’re making plus some of your tools at the same time well enough for you to work on it (so not 60hz, but not 30 seconds between actions, either!).
I have MacBook Air 2011 and it works fine. I don’t have massive scenes though.
Well when I say `fine’ it can take a few seconds for the scripts to recompile. And pressing play it takes a couple of seconds. But that happens on my Windows machine too.
Thanks for the help folks - I basically need a quad core or higher machine with 16gb of RAM as a minimum then as the game is high resolution and has tons of assets in each open level. Haven’t bought many PCs in the past, but will see what I can conjure up tomorrow for a reasonable price, as a high level mac is going to be too expensive. Any thoughts on what you would feel is base needed for a good PC game?
You want a gaming GPU (NVidia ending in 60 or 70, 4-6GB VRAM minimum). You’ll get most bang for your buck building a desktop. Cheap out on the case if you must, mobos can be a bit expensive, but the CPU, DDR4 RAM and PSU will be a major chunk of the total price if you want something durable and good. Use Anandtech guides to see what motherboard+CPU combinations support larger amounts of RAM, if that’s your pain point.
Never, ever install the system on anything but an SSD. Put in that extra bundle of cash for M.2 NVMe drives now - you should get a motherboard with a modern slot for that. You get 1GB/s drives with even higher IOPS than SATA3 now, and at least a 250GB drive is worth it (and more affordable).
If you want pre-built I’m sure there are at least some Razer desktop models which have the specs you need. Availability of other desktop brands depends on where in the world you are. Gaming systems built by shops are usually a safer bet than Dell, HP and the like. Lenovo is a trap.