For an extra $200.00 is it worth getting the i7 over the i5 for game development?

Not always, I remember this article:
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...s-2000-cheaper-than-the-equivalent-windows-pc

That Mac Pro was 2000$ cheaper than building it yourself, even the do-it-yourself had only 32GB instead of 64GB RAM.

But yes, probably an exception and an extreme example anyway.

[Edit:]
Also note that that maybe can be expected for the 9.7k$ model, they say it was the same for the cheaper one:

 

That may be cheaper than the equivalent PC, but I wouldn't call either machine in that comparison "performance on a budget", since either way we're talking about a $10,000 PC.

But yes, if you were in that ballpark I guess that'd be a great value proposition.

 

Absolutely correct on all counts. And as far as saving 5 seconds, that's irrelevant unless you sit down and wait on hour long bakes ready to pounce the exact moment they finish, compared to for example getting an ssd. If money is any concern, a good pc is the way to go, then dual boot Osx for ios targets (easy enough) or get a cheap used Macbook as a Web browsing and ios build device.

 

It's easy enough to dual boot Windows on a Mac, but it's quite difficult to dual boot OS X on a PC.

--Eric

 

That is highly unlikely unless your browser is attempting a world record in bleeding memory. If it is leaking memory, a good tip is to add an ad-blocker to it because they have a bad habit of allocating ram like maniacs to show some crappy picture of a certain famous persons ass or something else, equally silly...

My current PC is an old AMD with 4GB DDR3 ram, 560 GTI, SSD etc... (getting upgrade around the end of the month) I can have several Chrome windows filled with tabs from left to right, Unity, Mono, Calculator, MS Word & Excel, Spotify, Blender and more open at the same time during a normal day. The browser is always open but I might close some of the other programs down if I want to play something like Dragon Age : Inquisition on higher settings.
Oh, and two of my fans in the chassi is starting to make funny noises so the PC is running hotter then normal but I did clean it with a can of air to make it last 2-4 weeks until the new parts arrive.

Of course, things would get even worse if some of us didn't have bookmarks that are organized with surgical precision in a well thought-out folder system etc.

 

I have bookmarks bar for the most common things I like. Folders are: Work and Misc.


I generally rely on chrome's recall for links. For example I type f in the url bar and it brings up Unity forum. It adapts to my habits. Sorted by frequency. If I go somewhere often, the url bar and one letter is enough. If it's programming resources, it goes into work. Stuff I thought was cool that I might want later, goes into misc.

It's all very simple and self sorting. Mostly I don't need a bookmark since I remember the search term. I'll bet I can find the url to what I wanted quicker with the first 2 letters in the url bar than you can navigate 50 tabs.

Also less ram used, more focus, less distractions. I mean I appreciate people like a bazillion tabs, I just think it's stupid*. But that's my 2p and I'll be off.

* not intending offence to any individual, it's just honesty.

 

In fact one memory leak in Chrome that affected my PC was related to GPU hardware acceleration. That bug was fixed in december 2014. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=403471

 

It's always faster for me to run a search again that to go through bookmarks.

 

In this case since you want Mac wait for Unity 5 and the newest and cheapest MacMini which would far outperform your old iMac. Bizarre thing about Macs is if you try to save a lot of money by buying last year's model or used ones you generally can't, so the latest model makes sense. You can probably sell your old iMac for 1/2 or more the cost of a bottom of the line new MacMini.

 

Worrying about $200 and buying a Mac, does not compute!

 

I know. I've got a MacMini from mid-2007 about on par computationally with the OP's iMac and I can't bring myself to replace it even with a new MacMini when I can buy a new ASUS convertible tablet out later this year better than the MacBook Air for $600. If the OP wants to pub to iOS/osX they'll need to though.

 

This thread somehow reminds me of the day I was finally able to afford 8mb of ram after months of saving up, and finally able to play mechwarrior 2....

 

Hmmm. I've still never had 8 GB RAM in a personal computer. It hasn't been that long since the high speed servers at various work sites never exceeded 4GB.

 

You mean in the x86/64 world?
New IBM z13 supports 10TB of RAM (and 141 CPUs, each 8 core 5GHz). So many nice toys available outside of Windows/Intel land ;-)

 

He means specifically in those work sites he is involved with. The x86/64 world has had considerably more than 4GB for years. My own server hardware, a low-end ASUS board from ~2006, is capable of 16GB.

Just because it is available though doesn't mean you necessarily need it or are capable of taking advantage of it.

 

Thanks. But what does waiting for Unity 5 have to do with the decision on what hardware to buy?

 

It's relevant because your current HW can handle Unity 4.6.2 now but it won't be able to handle Unity 5 in the case of your iMac. By waiting for Unity 5 you are more likely than not to have more HW choices available then that can run Unity 5 at a better price. $200 is a lot to you, you implied.

 

Thanks again. Why won't my current iMac be able to handle Unity 5?
BTW. I didn't really mean that $200 is a lot for me. I just asked if the i7 over the i5 is WORTH $200 and if it would be better spent somewhere else. But I did write that $850 is way too much for a 1TB SSD.

 

It will; don't worry about it. If it can run Unity 4 it can run Unity 5.

--Eric

 

Sorry about that, your old iMac does allow you to upgrade to a version of osX that Unity 5 supports. Mine Mac does not. If $200 ain't a lot to you then buy the i7. In my experience unless I was rendering in Blender or similar there aren't huge differences between core 2 duos and the new i[3,5,7]s anyway. The big difference is reduced power consumption. Your ATI video card for rendering light maps is more important in that respect.

 

not for game developers. You'll crush that just baking enlighten.

 

i7 is a rip off for not much in return, 200$ much better spent on ssd, or better cooling water cooling.... you'd get more out of an extra few 100mhzs''s'ss's's+ overclock per core on a i5 with better cooling than waste it on a i7 and have average heatsink air cooling (ofc with good cooling on i7 then yeh even better but you're still spending more )

And note that under poor cooling and increased temperatures all cpu's will underclock themselves...all cpu's have a tj max setting or tcc look it up.. so that 5hr fking render, or light baking session will go slower if all cores cannot sustain being run at full speed or oc speed, not many seem to notice it but they do underclock. voltage/freq is throttled down, once the cpu goes past a certain cpu temperature..that temp varies per cpu type. just below 70c underload and oc is consider ok for most overclockers without watercooling, past 70c and many of the intel cpus actually underclock below 2ghz even, not much good if you want 4ghz per core under load 24/7

oh its worth noting for dedicated server owners aswel.. i had a 3.4xeon 1240 v3 with ovh and during the summer time the fcking cpu cores were heading down to 1ghz!. core temps were like 95c.Must have spent a while trying to find out why server performance had gone to S***, eventually found out it was the poor cooling on the server. Took ovh a week to fix it.

 

Who the hell wants to use enlighten, I avoid it like the plague its not worth the hassle.

 

Nobody, but it's kinda required if you want to bake anything in Unity 5.

 

A hobby machine where tinkering is a part of the fun is one thing, but work machines are about being productive. I'd much rather spend a few extra dollars if I need things to go faster and trust the manufacturer to have already set things up properly than having to tweak and test and generally worry about things.

I don't want to ever have to think about the cooling setup, or the clock speed, or the voltage regulation. Teams of experts at Intel or AMD were paid to think about those things for me - I'll happily take advantage of that.

Plus, it's not necessarily all about speed. Stability and reliability are also important.

 

Absolutely yes. You should choose i7 always. Specially I even recommend i7-6700K, not i7-6700. Is this experienceable? Yes I will say. And if laptop, I will choose i7-6820HK overclockable rather than normal i7-6700HQ.

 

I got along fine and released several successful titles using a Core 2 Duo, which I only replaced last year with an i5 4690, after comparing all of the factors vs an i7. It's not the tool. It's what you do with it.

 

C# compilation is fast. You can run a compilation in a potato.

 

Yeah, but why waste any time waiting for stuff over a measly $200. It's a false savings. You're not required to choose between a faster CPU or a SSD, you can just get both. Unless you're profoundly broke or really desperately need $200 for something else, it's a no-brainer.

--Eric

 

It depends a lot on what you're doing. I expect that for what a lot of people do in Unity the difference would be negligible.

 

A penny saved is a penny earned.

 

Seconds saved on baking and compiling times can quick add into minutes and then hours depending on your projects. With enough of those projects you may find the additional $200 upfront cost saves you more in the long term. You can somewhat offset this by working on other things during those periods but there will be times where you're held up by these stages.

 

No, the i5 is 4 core and the i7 is also 4 core but more treads. So actually the i5 is not so bad as you think (TokyoDan think is only 2 cores)

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/core-i5-processor.html

In my opinion, I do not know Mac well, I'm using standard PC windows7 / Windows 10. I update my i3 to i5K and then i7K.
The jump from i3 to i5 was for good. But the jump from i5 to i7 2600K and including a small OC in winter was little. It feels faster but just a bit more. Looks like it do not stop or it stop less often. With the i5 there was time it stop for just half a second when changing programs. I use Unity for making games and not more than 3 cpu treads are running at the same time at full power in general. This is my custom pc. So my personal conclusion is no. But depends on the budget. My budget was very low. If you budget is big then you are not making this question.

Is much better to spend that 200 in more SSD(small 256Gb or better 512Gb) is a must. repeat is a must. Then in this order, you can think about more GPU video card upgrade, 4K or extra monitor, 8Gb ram, asset store content, other additional software (for example substance painter?), AAPL stocks to spend them in a Mac upgrade later is also an option to consider since is 20% lower from the maximum and is a grate way to make small budget optimizations. And you can also save the cash as well for the unknown future. I mean that now that I know the difference between i7 and i5 i just can stay with a i5 (Steve Jobs can agree in that). I expect that your Mac includes a GPU so it do not depends in the CPU for rendering into the screen. A new 4K helps in case you have only one monitor. If 4k is too expensive or is a bad option because there is no gpu power to handle it, then consider to buy a second extra small monitor. Is nice to look into a reference image to compare or following a youtube tutorial on the side without switching windows (This is more important than a i7 upgrade).

The CPU running hard difference:
More score is better:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-01-CinebenchR15,3693.html

Less seconds is better:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-29-Adobe-Photoshop-CC,3720.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-11-PCMark-8-Creative,3703.html
the new generation:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-8.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-9.html

As you can see the difference in performance is small. If you are an expert probably you can say that you need a i7 for intensive baking, builds or compiling code modifications but will be not your case:
The problem you have is the SSD. the SSD will save 50% of your loading time.
We use a SSD to install Windows and a extra HDD to put content. In the SSD we put the most often staff.
In you Mac you will probably ad an external SSD so is not nesasary to be big. It can be 128Gb just for opening fast your game and assets. But if you can install your OS in a SSD then look for a 512Gb because 256Gb can be a bit small. Consider the updates that increase over time and make OS bigger over time.
Is only an opinion of an non Mac user. Good luck!

 

Then you're likely not aware that some of their Core i5s and i7s are not quad core processors. Apple's desktop computers are basically mobile hardware or at least somewhat similar to mobile hardware in nature. The Mac Mini is one of the better examples of this. It has Core i5s and i7s that are dual-core.

http://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

Some of the lower end models of the iMac have dual-core i5s too.

http://www.apple.com/imac/specs/

 

Same frequency i5 and i7 have very different single-core performance.

 

Thanks Ryiah, didn't know that. Probably more info about this 2 Mac options can help in the question, also because of the GPU, ram speed and CPU L1 L2 Cache.

i5 quad‑core:
http://www.apple.com/imac/specs/

It is fascinating making hardware budget decisions.

 

Yeah, contrary to Intel's marketing up until a few years ago clock speed is in fact not the only spec that matters.

 

I built my current Gaming PC back in 2012 and for the first time i didnt skimp on features. Built an i7-3770k with 16Gb Ram and a GTX680OC and 256Gb SSD and a 1TB mechanical drive and it destroys worlds (relatively speaking ). Never again will skimp on performance, the long term benefit is just too good. I am about to build a proper workstation for IT development so i can keep my personal gaming computer just for gaming. For the 1st time i am going to have two screens...OMG i Cant wait .

 

With a decent i7 (2nd generation and on) there IS a longterm at all

 

It always amazes me when dev studios try to cut costs on hardware, when they're spending so much to pay the person that's operating that hardware.

Even if something like an SSD or a 2nd monitor only translates to a 1% gain in productivity, 1% of a year's salary for an experienced developer will more than cover that cost of that component.

And a lot of developers do spend a lot of time waiting for their machines to do things. Particularly if you're working with Android/iOS plugins, can't test code in the editor, so are constantly doing builds to test minor changes.

 

Get Skylake and fast RAM.

 

No... plain simple.

i5 and i7 are 30% apart in performance, best case. That best case will maybe happen once in a blue moon.

There are just as many times the i7 is actually SLOWER unless you switch off Hyperthreading, to the point the slightly higher clock will be eaten away.
Yes, it happened to me when testing my Unity build on an i7 while the game was bottlenecked by the CPU. Unity 4 builds apparently couldn't use more than 4 threads. Yet because of the overhead of HT, the 4 virtual cores stressed on the i7 where slower than when I finally deactivated HT in the BIOS. Gave me a good 5-10% more FPS.

Now, I am just talking about the Desktop CPUs, and take my words with a grain of salt. If you build a PC for 1500 bucks, that additional 100 bucks a Desktop i7 costs is really not that much in the grand total. Yet if you do use a lot of applications which 1. can heavely multithread (like lightmap baking in Unity) and 2. really stress the machine (like lightmap baking in Unity), you might be happy about the up to 30% lower amount of time needed for those tasks.
I still gotta ask how often you bake lightmaps versus the CPU just idling away while you surf the web, or use the Unity editor normally. Still, might be worth the 5-6% higher price for such a desktop build.

If you build a desktop on the cheap, do not bother with i7. The performance gains are nowhere near worth the 50% higher price of the CPU.


Now, if we are talking about laptop CPUs, things are slightly different. For the 15 Watts (and I think also the 28 watts) parts, ALL cpu are dual cores, AFAIK all of them have HT to simulate a slow 4 core CPU.
i7 are just better binned parts with higher frequency. That of course is beneficial in a wider range of use cases.

I would still advise you to REALLY think long and hard about spending more on a laptop with an i7. Most probably you will not use the additional performance 95% of the time.


The big question you should aks yourself is: how often do I stress the CPU to the max, and is it really that much of a bother to wait 30% longer for the process to finish? Or can I just grab an additional coffe and come back 5 minutes later?

 

When the OP made this thread over a year and a half ago the question was about iMacs. I also think he's made a decision by now.

 

Yes, the general rule of thumb with computer equipment is to buy the best that you can afford at the time of purchase. When speccing out a system there are several other components to consider aside from just the CPU. The budget is usually for the full build, because upgrading to a much better CPU will generally mean getting a new motherboard, which probably means swapping out your RAM, which then means... And so on.

There will ALWAYS be a faster processor right around the corner. At some point you have to stop worrying about seconds saved and just get busy making games. Dropping $200 or more every time a faster component comes out, just because it might save a little time in aggregate will quickly stop being worth it.

 

That is why my i7 970 I bought 5 years ago turned out to be one of the best investments I made in years.
To this day its within 10-20% of the fastest hexacores intel offers, and to this day no CPU with more cores has come down into "sane price land" (which for me is below 600$ per CPU).

Yes, the platform is totally outdated by now, USB3 speeds are slower than on more modern motherboards, no PCI 3.0 or M2 SSDs for me, and the system startup takes considerably longer than on a system with fast boot BIOS.
And I use more power to drive it.


Still, this System will serve me well for another 2+ years without being slow compared to more modern systems. I spend my budget for hardware rather where I DO get a good improvement more often, like GPUs.

 

Just replace your motherboard then.

 

Except this isn't a matter of what's available right around the corner. That Core i7 is available to him right now. Upgrading later may end up being considerable harder and more expensive as you only have so many options with an iMac without having to buy an entire new unit.

You can't simply replace the motherboard to an iMac.

 

Then he need to replace the iMac with a real PC . I bet he saves 200 just on that.

 

That's a nonsensical post. The user may have a lot invested in OS X software, may find the Mac workflow better, etc. You don't "just replace" a system with a completely different system over $200. In any case this topic isn't a "Mac vs PC" war so don't go down that road please. It started out as i5 vs i7 in an iMac, but has moved on to i5 vs i7 in general.

--Eric

 

SSD idea is fine (VS loads a crapton of things to run). CPU-GPU high requirements come in with pc development or/and rendering/baking stuff (not just unity).