I’m buying a laptop for university. A desktop PC isn’t an option. I want to be able to continue my game development while there, so I’m looking for a pretty decent machine. My current desktop system has an i7-4790, a 2GB GTX 760 and 16GB RAM. I have narrowed it down to two systems but I am struggling to make up my mind. They are the exact same price, and since I’m going to university I’m on a tight budget.
System 1:
i7-7700HQ
GTX 1050 4GB
128 GB SSD + 1TB HDD
8GB RAM
System 2:
i7-7700HQ
GTX 1050 2GB
No SSD / 1TB HDD
16GB RAM
I’ve highlighted the main differences. At the moment I’m leaning towards system 2 because of the extra RAM; I’m afraid with 8GB things may get sluggish with Maya, Unity and a texturing program open.
8 gigs of ram is fine. Totally fine, the only time when you want like 32 Gigs of ram is during lighting baking of massive scenes.
Everything else is either CPU or GPU related.
I used 8 Gigs on an i3 with dedicated graphics for years with Unity. The only issue I ever faced was the GPU part.
So focus more on GPU and CPU, and if anything see if you can upgrade to 16 gigs on the first system instead.
I was using a Laptop that was probably 5 years old at the time (Upgraded to another build) when PBR became a thing in Unity. The GPU was just too weak for it… So I was using the laptop briefly when Unity adapted the Standard Shader - which worked on it - but sucked. At least these Laptops have 1050’s in them, so you’re good unless you’re making AAA Titles lol.
But I’m using right at the moment
AMD FX-8350 CPU
RX 480 Gfx Card
32 Gigs DDR3 Ram
System 1. You can always upgrade the memory at a later date and I’m not aware of any modern laptops that are maxed out at 8GB. They might have all of the slots populated, but a typical maximum memory for most laptops is at least 12 to 16GB.
On the other hand graphics memory is almost never upgradeable and with many mainstream cards shipping with at least 4GB and often as high as 8GB I feel like having anything less will end up being a hindrance sooner rather than later.
There are a lot of other important concerns when buying a laptop including battery life, build quality and cooling. I would be worried about the 2GB video card. The SSD will make the computer feel a lot faster. My desktop has 8GB and I never had a problem with that.
I am currently developing on an MSI Dominator pro with 16GB, a 1070, 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD. It is great but battery life sucks and it isn’t the most portable.
I personally would go for more RAM. It’s reasonably easy to swap out your HDD for an SSD at a later time if you want. SSDs will definitely speed up your boot time, but won’t make that much difference in terms of Unity itself. Lightmap baking an chew up a lot of RAM (and CPU). I’ve got 64 Gigs in my desktop and it’s not unusual for it to chew up 20+ of that.
well… the time is not insignificant. Depends on the SSD… some are faster than others but lightning fast compared to the old platter drives. But… there are a finite number of writes you can make. I actually setup symlinks and moved my unity cache folders and everything off to a platter drive because I don’t want to be burning up writes on my SSD.
If you’re looking solely at boot times then it’s completely understandable why you missed the benefits.
Basically for any situation where you need data from storage that isn’t being stored in local memory, whether because it doesn’t fit in memory or it simply hasn’t been cached yet (eg first access after starting the system) or was removed from the cache, you will find substantial performance increases. Especially when accessing random locations on the drive.
Below are the results of a recent benchmark for my storage drives. The top-most drive is a Western Digital Black (the performance tier of their consumer HDDs) running at 7200 RPM. It’s currently largely unused because most of my data benefits from my primary drive.
My primary drive is the second set of results. It’s a Samsung 850 EVO SSD running through SATA III. I want to start by pointing out that it was priced roughly in the middle in terms of consumer drives but it is budget tier performance now compared to most drives. A modern NVMe SSD is easily five to six times faster for only a little more.
Going off your estimate of 45 seconds to an 8 second boot time, which is fairly accurate by the way, would suggest SSDs are only five times faster, but as you can see below in some cases they are hundreds of times faster. For some tasks that would normally be bottlenecked by an HDD, I have found the CPU bottlenecking when an SSD was used.
Not to be stubborn - but can you describe these tasks? Basically I’m almost never in a situation where I’m sitting at my computer just waiting. Even if something’s taking a little while (which is almost never–maybe waiting for composed music or 4K images to be exported to common file types), there’s something else I can do.
Someone mentioned lightmap baking, which might be a concern, but I’ve never reached that point (and prefer to use some type of realtime lighting when I can) in any projects. I suppose it might save about 1 second each time I move from Visual Studio back to Unity and wait for scripts to compile.
Honestly, just live in your bubble, it’s fine. Consider for a moment though that it’s not just 1 second but generally, makes everything instant ish. There is still loading time, but it’s a lot more productive…
I just cannot do without SSD now. I can close apps and open them as much as I like. Baking is faster. Compiling is faster, searching is faster, everything I guess. Visual studio runs without lag, opens right away etc…
If you have a lot of ram you might not see much improvement, but once the OS goes to swap because you filled it up, you won’t notice it with an SSD but you will feel degradation with a normal HD.
I might be an extreme case though as I don’t use smaller than 1TB SSDs.
For my current project it’s building Windows installers at every build which is currently a daily process. With an HDD the task is barely using any processing power, but once I start using an SSD the CPU maxes out. Which saves considerable time.
What’s even better about this example is that I’m on a positively ancient processor which should benefit the HDD, but it can’t keep up with my Phenom II X4 965 at all. Which by the way is about the same speed as a second generation i5 and we’re now up to seventh generation which is easily twice as fast per core and more than four cores.
By the way, on a funny note, Visual Studio went from easily a minute to a few seconds to start and this sudden performance increase was not restricted to Visual Studio. I’m able to re-open applications so quickly I rarely keep them open all the time which helps tremendously since my MB capped out at 16GB RAM.
What’s interesting about 1TB SSDs is that they’re almost exactly twice as expensive as 512GB SSDs, so some people have been building systems with two 512GB SSDs and using RAID 0 on them to achieve almost double the performance.
