I was planning to buy a new computer and I saw that there are two types of graphic card: workstation (better to work with CAD and very complicated meshes) and gaming (optimized for games). What is the best one? Does unity take advantage of a workstation architecture?
2 Answers
2I’m not definitively sure whether Unity would utilize the extra or specialized functionality of such a card.
Consider: Your development rig must ideally be at least as good as the highest-end device on which you plan to release your game.
Having more horsepower on your development rig may help the development process at times, but may also cause you to lose touch with the limitations of lesser machines, leading you to release a product which cannot run on low-end hardware without extensive optimizations, shutting the door on potential customers with older or weaker machines.
Having less horsepower on your development rig than the most you plan to target for the end product would be quite silly, especially with the performance overhead associated with running the game in the editor.
I would estimate that 80% of Unity developers have less-than-5-year-old enthusiast, midrange, or budget grade graphics cards, and most of the other 20% will have inferior, dated, or integrated cards. A workstation class card is not essential in any way.
I wouldn’t really worry too much if you’re going to be developing with Unity. My computer is a few years old and has even older parts. I probably spent a total of $500 on my computer and it runs Unity just fine, as well as multiple applications at once without any major issues. In unity I was able to make very large scale environments and this was in the 32 bit version. So I would say it’s perfectly fine to go with a cheap gaming graphics card.