I’m on a budget and need a laptop that can handle a heavy-resource game. The HP 17.3 inch HD Laptop looks like it could be good (although it’s slightly over my budget). But I’m not sure if it’s good enough and if an R5 graphics card could support my game…
I’ve tried using Unity with its basic requirements on a different laptop (an ancient HP g6 series, 4GB Ram, Intel i5 and 2.67GHz), but it couldn’t handle the game, it was constantly lagging, crashing, etc.
I’ve tried finding a laptop online but it’s very difficult to find decent, budget laptops (I’m not surprised). But perhaps someone here knows of any? Maybe any on sale at the moment for Christmas?
Thanks!
EDIT: I would prefer if it wasn’t too heavy either since I’ll have to carry it around a lot. But that’s probably asking for too much, so it’s OK if it’s not.
For that price, it’s better to get an AMD because you’ll get a better graphics chip. Pay for some extra memory installed so it has a minimum of 8 gig. Intel has a faster cpu, but slower integrated chip. If you can find one with a dedicated graphics chip that would be better, but integrated, go AMD.
It depends on what your game is. If you’re making a match-three game for Android, the requirements are pretty different to if you’re making Ori the the Blind Forest.
You need a computer that’s strong enough to run an unoptimised version of the game you want to make plus a bunch of tools on top.
We’d need to know more about your game before we could make a recommendation. Note that for “heavy resource” stuff the premium you pay for portability may have a significant impact on your options.
Well, first thing to do is make sure you have enough RAM. If you run Windows 10, then 4GB is basically enough to just boot the OS. Upgrade to at least 8GB.
Realistically speaking, these three things don’t go together very well:
budget
laptop
heavy-resource game
You could easily spend your entire budget for just the video card for a desktop PC in order to handle a heavy-resource game. For example, you could look at Nvidia GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 video cards for desktop PCs, and those video cards are great for heavy-resource games. Unfortunately, you would also need to have a powerful desktop PC to install the video card into.
There are high end gaming laptops that can run heavy-resource games, but those are quite expensive. They are also not super light weight, because there is more stuff in them.
What type of game are you calling “heavy-resource game”? Depending on what you are calling “heavy-resource game”, it may or may not actually require a powerful computer. There are relatively low cost AMD APUs in some budget laptops that are adequate for games that do not use heavy resources but still look cool.
That laptop would be fine for making a lot of games. It would not handle what I consider to be heavy-resource games, though. Without knowing the details about the game, it is hard to say if that laptop could handle it.
Thanks for the replies guys.
The game is a 3D third person RPG. It’s closed world, though for future games I would like to make open world. Though that might be too much for a cheap laptop to handle…
Unfortunately that doesn’t tell us a lot about what you mean by “heavy resources”. Can you tell us why you think your game will be heavy on resources? Or can you give us examples of games that it is like?
From experience even a semi-openworld RPG can bring most computers to it’s knee’s when developing (dependant on scene size and graphics), I chucked an 18 core Xeon w/ 32GB RAM and a GTX 1080 at Unreal. There was still a lot of 30FPS frame rates plus drinking coffee en mass waiting for compiling and lighting to build.
Even in Unity w/ Enlighten etc. it still required a lot of grunt to get going, like everyone says it’s very much dependant on your project, some 3D RPG’s targeted towards mobile could happily run off a mediocre laptop but if you’re going for shiny with cranked everything I’d recommend a desktop or you’ll easily be at the $2K mark for a decent laptop.
