Game Devs - Suggest Hardware?

I require a computer that is suitable for producing AAA games. Currently I am using an Windows 8.1 Acer laptop with an i3, 8GB and some graphics card (I don't understand graphics cards). I am finding that this machine is becoming inadequate for my needs.

Could someone who knows computer specs advise me on what to look for in a computer for Unity. I am looking at i7 Quad Core desktops, but aside from X amount of RAM and processor names, I don't know what else to look for.

Are there any computer brands that you think are better/worse than others? I don't want to get something that doesn't age well, or has a bad reputation.

I also would be interested to know if anyone cares which version of Windows someone is running (does it actually matter what version I am on?). I am running Win 8.1, but know that it is maligned by many for good reason. I could get a 7, or even wait for 10 - but the latest tech isn't always the best tech.

Thank you in advance.

 

Sounds like you're the worrying type who hasn't made many games before. AAA isn't hardware dependant, it's basically the budget for it. There's AAA games on Xbox 360 and that's nowhere near the power of your acer laptop tbh.

So I'd suggest you focus energy on actually making the game. And fyi windows 8.1 is fine.

 

If you must have a Laptop, I suggest an MSI in the ~$1k range.

Otherwise, screw Laptops / Win 8 and get a more powerful desktop way cheaper.

 

geez.... developping with a laptop.....omg... talking about visual development, if you don't have at least 2 monitors and 16 GB ram , things will become very tedious..

 

Yeah, I agree about laptops being a handicap. For game development, a powerful multi monitor desktop system is the real ticket.

 

I do all game playing and development on my 17" laptop. Sitting on couch or back patio makes it a whole lot better than being stuck at a desk or table. Kind of off topic but actually for the past 12 years even my job I have worked only on a laptop. I did get a large second monitor a month or two ago from my company for my work laptop but have not hooked it up yet.

I am looking at the MSI GT70 Dominator 2294 for my next personal laptop. Looks like a huge upgrade over the 2008 HP laptop I am currently using.

 

Desktops are easier to use, cheaper to maintain and offer a better performance per dollar ratio to laptops. The only reason to choose a laptop over a desktop as your primary dev environment is for mobility, for instance if you move from office to office frequently.

My office looks like something out of minority report, though.. So I'm pretty biased.

 

I completely agree about desktops. I brought the laptop for educational use, it was never purchased with game development in mind. Now I am serious about game development, I am looking to buy a snazzy desktop. I was looking at this one, but I would rather be well educated in my purchase than being ill advised.

 

Tweakers best buy guide is all you need.

 

Don't buy a brandname desktop, buy a barebone kit from Newegg and put it together yourself. Its so easy now you don't even need to know what the components are to plug it all up.

 

Exactly. Spend less and have a better computer.

 

I guess everybody has a different outlook on the issue. For me personally, I don't think of time sitting at a nice desktop computer as being "stuck". I absolutely love sitting at a nice multi monitor desktop PC and programming all day and into the night. I have tried working from a laptop on the couch, the sun room, and the back patio, but that never worked for me. I was less comfortable and less productive with the laptop. At least for me, I don't view a laptop as a productive work terminal.

A lot of being comfortable with a desktop computer comes from having a nice room setup with enough desktop surfaces and an excellent chair. A cheap "computer" desk and a cheap chair can make desktop computing a lot less enjoyable.

 

Yep it all comes down to personal preferences. When work first switched over to laptops I didn't care much for it at all. After a year I ended up liking it better. So later when it was time to replace my desktop I got a laptop. For me it greatly increased productivity.

I also work from home for my job... so job work I sit at a desk and use the work laptop. For personal work I sit in the living room (or wherever) with my personal laptop. The different locations help to separate on the job from off the job "modes". I used to sit in living room for job work too but found the two distinct modes were kind of overlapping too much. When I was on personal time it felt a bit like I was still "at work". I don't think I'll ever get a desktop again. Sometimes I used to take my laptop to the park and work on my projects even. It just makes it nice to have the easy portability.

 

Well the advice from someone that now has a broken PC tablet that is now 3 years old and was obsolete before it was even broken costing him something like $1300 USD I say go for a mid-range MacMini 2014. It will run Windows 10. It will run os X 10. It will have no extra hardware to break or get obsolete quicker than normal. However, since it's an Apple HW device it will cost at $650 about twice what it should but think of it as a PC (Bootcamp) and a Mac at $325 each. I'd call it a AA type hardware though as AAA is really more about have the money to hire more staff to do bespoke art and bespoke programming than you need.

Of course, since I'm saving to buy one of these in September myself I am biased for that solution. There are laptops and such that can do both too but really aren't needed unless you are one of these people that types and takes notes in class.

 

This is actually a really good suggestion. I picked up a Mac-Mini back around 2010, and it's still serving me well as a Mac development environment. (paid around $700) A more modern, recent Mac-Mini would likely be able to run Bootcamp effectively for some quality dual-booting, and would allow for a very broad spread of supported platforms. (at a very reasonable price)

The downside is that you would be limited to integrated graphics instead of a full-on GPU setup, so while it would be a decent development environment it would only be middling for actually playing games. But that is a matter of priorities.

Ideally, you should have numerous different hardware configurations available for testing. Modern PC development necessitates a nice broad spread of different platforms for testing purposes. Three or four different boxes with different targeted specs would be much better than just one singular box. Of course, a setup like that would be considerably more expensive than just a single development unit. But that is just the way of things.

Goat's modern Mac-Mini suggestion strikes me as very solid for maximizing your platform and testing reach on a mid-range box that should be relatively stable. An extra OEM copy of Windows 7-8.1 should only run you around $120 - $180, so you should be able to bootcamp up a dual-booting dev box for less than $1000. Considering the fact that a dev environment like that will give you access to the vast majority of PC and mobile targets, I'd say it is a good buy.

 

My 2009 iMac with 4gb of RAM and a 9400m graphics card served me well enough until PBR came along. Of course, editing 4k textures with multiple layers on a 4gb machine was pretty painful and I had to guesstimate what modern machines would be able to handle. So a modern Mac Mini should be fine. I think you need to be honest with yourself about what you mean by AAA. As hippocoder said, AAA is about the budget. I'm guessing you don't have a few million dollars laying around. If you are talking about graphics quality, then you'll need the skills to create those art assets, or the money to have someone do it for you.

I just spent way more than my budget (and income level) allows for purchasing a laptop with 16gb of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 970m card. I was content with my earlier decision to go with a much cheaper laptop with a 840m until I realized that it might be a very long time before I have the money to purchase another computer, even at the lower price point of the current 840m machines. So I decided that while I've got a decent gig going, it made more sense to future proof myself. If I had a more stable income, that would have been less of a concern for me.

Regarding the laptop vs desktop equation, I don't think the laptop will replace my desktop fully, despite its massive increase in power. So it will be a secondary machine overall even if it becomes a primary development machine. I like the idea of having both. So I have the option of which experience I want to have. If you've already got a laptop that is fine except for development needs, then the Mac Mini would also serve to provide you with a similar experience.

 

The manner of game you are attempting to make is also a major factor in hardware decisions.

If you want to push graphics as far as they can go, you are going to need a more powerful computer for development. Not only will you need the rendering muscle for testing the game itself, but you will need the extra processing power for working with high-end graphical programs and abnormally large graphic files. (high-resolution textures, high-polycount sculpted models, etc...) ZBrush, MudBox, and Sculptris are all going to chug on lower-end systems.

If you are focused on developing for mobile, your development environment can be scaled down considerably. Even low-end desktops and laptops are going to be able to out-perform the average smartphone and tablet. And testing on emulators isn't as important as testing on the targeted mobile platform anyway. This area of development would benefit greatly from a Mac-Mini approach to hardware. (the most platform reach and performance balance for your buck)

If you are going for more of a mid-range desktop, just get a basic pre-built box and perform a little upgrade. I'm thinking drop a mid-sized GPU in there. (perhaps something in the GTX 700 range)

 

I recommend starting by analyzing the hardware used by other AAA companies. Epic Games has one example of their past hardware specifications up on their Unreal 3 documentation pages.

https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UE3MinSpecs.html#PC Hardware Spec Used by Epic Games

Actual cost for those systems appears to be missing for the Dell Precision workstations (the one used by level designers and artists), but PC Magazine still has pricing information for the Lenovo ThinkStation. Brand new it was just shy of $10,000.

 

you can build a serious beast for 2500 or so

 

The OP asked for AAA hardware recommendations. Whether or not he needs it is irrelevant to my posts as he's already gotten solid advice from others. I simply wanted to point out the hardware used by AAA companies.

Epic Games uses workstations over more normally available desktops for their reliability and extensive capabilities.

 

yep you're right; but also because major hardware companies can exchange or repair in a very short delay...
i think AAA companies have all kind of top notch hardware depending on witch use, but they also have old crap for testing purpose....

 

If I were still going the route of pre-built systems, I would likely go the way of Lenovo's business line-up. At this point though I buy and assemble my own computers. It is very trivial to do so. Once I've gotten some money accumulated, this will be my next system. You could throw in another ~$300 for a GTX 980 Ti but for my purposes that would be overkill.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Ryiah/saved/nPsfrH

 

nice beast ! (make shure the video card fits in the case, it happenned to me )

 

I was more worried about the custom heatsink. The Hyper 212 EVO is almost 160mm tall.

 

Yeah, a big-name company is going to have the kind of capital that would allow them to splurge on hardware. They wouldn't think twice about spending $5000+ on a single employees workstation. After all, the employee using that workstation is going to be way more expensive in the long run. Even a $10,000 rig is peanuts compared to the professional working on it. (between $60,000 - $80,000 annually)

Expecting to pick up full-on AAA-level hardware is a bit unrealistic for an indie developer. Indie developers tend to be lean and bare-bones. They also tend to be do-it-yourself. (cause you have to) A build-your-own-box approach is much better for the average indie dev.

For that approach, I'd say around $2000 - $3000 should be enough for a pretty capable high-end desktop rig. For that kind of budget I could put together a really solid rig with some substantial performance. We're talking in the range of 32 GB of RAM, a solid state drive for applications, a hybrid drive for backup and large-scale storage, a Core i7 latest generation, and a decently beefy 3D card. (GTX 900 series) I probably wouldn't bother with an SLI or Crossfire setup, that's a bit of overkill, even for a high-end development box.

A rig like that would give you plenty of horsepower for dealing with high-end game engines and graphical applications, and would even be able to play most performance-intensive games.

 

Personally, as partially shown in my link above, I intend to go with a 1TB SSD for primary storage (applications and current Unity projects). Actual backup storage though I wouldn't waste my time with hybrid drives. Instead I would buy three or more Toshiba HDDs (~$140 for 5TB) and put them into a RAID 5.

A RAID 5 configuration gives a contiguous chunk of space along with redundancy (up to one drive failure at a time) and increased read speeds (speed multiplier is equal to the number of drives minus one).

 

For optimizing performance on an SSD, it's actually better to get a smaller drive. Around 180 GB is considered optimal. With the larger 1TB SSDs, there is a slight hit to performance compared to the smaller drives. So having a smaller drive is more cost-effective for maximizing your performance on running your OS and major performance-intensive applications.

But obviously, if you are wanting to use your rig to play games, 180 GB is most likely not going to cut it. That's why I recommend a hybrid drive as secondary storage. I keep most of my Steam library installed on the secondary hybrid. This provides better performance without having to spend the ridiculous amounts that TB-sized SSDs usually run.

For long-term backup, I agree that a RAID configuration would be better. Of course, if I was putting one of those together I would store it in a separate system and have my SVN server use it. For long-term backup I wouldn't need the files local to my gaming rig.

 

If you're concerned about performance you could buy multiple SSDs rather than a single large one.

Steam can install games to different drives as well as directories. Therefore a game benefiting more from an HDD can be installed to an HDD and likewise for SSDs. Any other situation can simply be fixed by moving the directory and using a symbolic link to fool the system.

The Samsung 850 EVO has a price tag of $70 for 128GB, $100 for 256GB, $200 for 512GB, and $380 for 1TB. The cost for the different interfaces - SSD, mSATA, and M.2 - are only a few dollars different.

 

SSD drives are massively faster than hard drives. A single nice SSD drive can deliver 100,000 IOPS. One hard drive can typically deliver about 100 IOPS. That is a huge difference.

Using RAID does not offset the performance enough. You could install 24 SATA hard drives in RAID10, and still only obtain a tiny fraction of the performance of a single SSD drive. And RAID5 is even worse that way. With RAID5, the write performance is very slow regardless of how many hard drives you have.

Get SSD drives for maximum performance. If you need a lot of disk space, buy multiple SSD drives. Old fashion hard drives are a serious performance bottleneck.

 

RAID is useless to the average person. It is only useful in very niche situations.

SSD's are about 50 cents per GB and SSD's are so good, HDDs should only be secondary storage drives at this point. Buying a new computer and making a HDD the primary drive is a waste of hardware.

 

Yes, but you aren't restricted to using an HDD RAID or using an SSD. You can have both in a single system. The RAID array serves the purpose of backing up the SSD in addition to long-term storage.

Not to mention a RAID is not restricted to HDDs. You can combine SSDs into a RAID (you may want a custom RAID card designed to handle it) to achieve even higher performance. A pair of 512GB SSDs is not that much different in cost compared to a 1TB SSD.

 

Its another one of those procrastinating things
'I should start making my game...Oh no, it seems I cant because...hardware, yes I need better hardware. Oh deary me, I guess I cant start making it yet!'
A lot of people do a similar thing with GDD's, because its just a big document of ideas, pretty much anything non-technical. But hardware is one of the most prominent excuses.

 

I finally ordered my laptop today. Fortunately, there was 1 (LAST ONE!!) left in stock.

I think it will be a hell of a fine gaming and development machine:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJ4B2HC

 

My Asus came in yesterday and it is pretty much the same. It has the HQ processor instead of the MQ, so yours is a bit faster. I don't know what you are used to working with, but I absolutely love mine. It is such a massive step up from what I've been using. I'm stuck on satellite internet though, so I can only download large files between midnight and 5am. Last night was mostly just getting all the software I need downloaded.

 

I am using my HP Pavillion dv7-1020 us entertainment laptop. Bought it back in October 2008... nearly 7 years ago. It was a very impressive laptop at that time. And it still runs the PC games I play (which for AAA is only Diablo 3) ok. But I notice some of the Unity 3D games people on these forums post run kind of slow. I suppose they could just have poor performance. I know the video card in this machine is outdated now and this laptop cannot last forever. After nearly 8 years of service I think it deserves a rest. I plan on doing all of my gaming and development on the new machine and using this laptop to test my games for performance. I figure if my games can run in a web browser on this machine without any performance issues then they will be fine for desktop builds on most modern PCs. The new machine should make graphics work much faster (I used to actually spend quite a bit of time in Blender and Bryce and so forth). It should also be very good when I move into 3D game dev at some point. Most importantly, I want a machine that will last for another 7 to 8 years and be able to run most of the modern games at that time well enough to play them!

 

After looking into custom PCs and specs since starting this thread, I feel that I have come up with a spec that will allow me to play games at high graphics (so I can create in high graphics with very little/no lag). Below is aforementioned spec:

Processor: Intel 4th Gen Quad Core I7 4790K 4.0GHz
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900 1866MHz Dual Channel Kit
Hard Drive 1: 120GB Solid State Drive
Hard Drive 2: 2TB 3.5" 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 2GB
Optical Drive: 22x DVD Writer
PSU: 600W PSU
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-SLI Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) Motherboard
Cooling: Arctic Freezer i30 CPU Cooler
Sound: Onboard Audio
Operating System: Windows 8.1 Professional

Any feedback on what I am looking at would be appreciated. I can get this for just shy of £1100,00. Do you concur that it will achieve what I need it to? Do you think that this it is worth the price tag?

 

i'd go for a 800 W PSU and a 256 GB SSD at least (512 is better ofc)
do you plan SLI ? a big GPU is better that two IMO ( more stability, less complication)
i have a gtx 680 2gb that performs quite as well as your gtx 960, maybe a 4GB model or the 970 is Worth the price

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-960-vs-Nvidia-GTX-680/3165vs3148

 

For some context... the specs you listed above are basically the same as my new laptop (which is supposed to arrive today!) except for my CPU speed is 2.5 to 3.5 GHz (with the turbo boost mode), GPU is 3GB GTX 970M and your RAM is 1866 MHz compared to laptop's 1600 MHz.

My laptop cost $1,600 (about £1,036) and the 17" screen accounts for some of it of course. Kind of comparing apples to oranges but price seems reasonable I'd guess.

 

@kittik

That can't be right, I've got an Asus ROG Laptop which would slap that machine silly and it only cost £500.00 more.. Let me spec something up for you.! Our office machines are far more powerful and come in cheaper (Edit I was wrong there ), also DDR4 isn't worth the cost.. You'd be better spending your money on a GPU / larger SSD (Larger the SSD the more speed)..!

 

Before I start, is there a reason you need a machine like this?

Ok these are both able to tear down the skies, no matter which engine or what game you're working on these are more than enough.. A few notes: Option 1 (More expensive) is a little more future proof than Option 2, as the 1150 socket is pretty much done. So if you upgrade in the future, you won't have to buy RAM and a new motherboard..!

But Option 2 will last you years, it's still a beast.. What it lacks in multi-tasking power like Option 1, it more than makes up for in per core grunt!.

By the way, for the budget you stated.. I was easily able to get one of the most powerful GPU's on the market today.!!

Office Machine cost:
ASRock X99 Extreme4 Socket 2011-3 (168.32) (E-buyer)
Core I7-5830K (3.3GHZ Hexacore) (304.98) (E-buyer)
G-Skill RipJaw 2666MHZ 16GB DDR (127.05) (E-buyer)
Samsung Evo 850 500GB (145.98) (E-buyer)
XFX 850W (80Plus Bronze Cert) (83.98) (Dabs)
Palit Geforce 980 4GB (389.98) (Dabs)
Cooler Master Hyper 612 Ver2 (44.50) (E-buyer)
£1264.79

Cheaper option:
I7 4790K (4.0GHZ Quad) (268.17)
Asus Z-970P Socket 1150 (66.53)
Samsung Evo 850 500GB (145.98) (E-buyer)
Corsair 16GB 1866MHZ Ballistix (105.88) (E-buyer)
XFX 850W (80Plus Bronze Cert) (83.98) (Dabs)
Palit Geforce 980 4GB (389.98) (Dabs)
Cooler Master Hyper 612 Ver2 (44.50) (E-buyer)
£1105.02

 

I wouldn't necessarily assume that Socket 2011 is any more future proof than Socket 1150.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7773/intels-three-versions-of-socket-2011-not-compatible

 

I meant as in, with the 2011-V3 you can go all the way up to a 5960X (Octocore) if you desire whereas the 4790K is the stopping point.. Personally I have the 5820K's overclocked to 4GHZ on a corsair H100i, so I'll not need it any time soon.

Just a note though, Broadwell is coming to the 1150 and 2011-V3 (apparently) it's going to be Skylake which comes in late and ruins the party..

 

If anyone still sells the processor when the time comes that you want to upgrade. I've had that happen before.

 

Just thought I'd give you an update here. Might be useful to others as well.

The Heaven Benchmark on BASIC for my previous laptop purchased in 2008:



The Heaven Benchmark for my new MSI laptop also running in BASIC (and looking as smooth as silk):


A massive improvement to say the least. I was actually content developing and playing games on the old laptop and I can only imagine everything being a little better experience now. I imagine you saw the same kind of performance increase and are happily developing on your new laptop now.

The only thing I dislike is this Windows 8.1 ... why they need to change it all around and make it more difficult to find programs is beyond me. Will get used to it in time I am sure.

 

Or you'll simply replace it with Windows 10 like most people come July 29th.

 

I know it looks different, but to me Win 7, 8 and 10 all work the same way in regards to finding stuff - press the Windows key (or Command if it's a Mac keyboard), start typing the name of the thing you want, press the Enter key when the thing you want is highlighted. This is probably why all the fuss about the Start menu / Metro interface has kind of passed me by.

 

Yeah I am slowly sorting it out. Actually converting it over to be more like XP and Vista. Booting to desktop. Set up a My Computer shortcut on desktop, killing visual themes /Aeros or whatever it is called kind of crap. It amazes me the resources wasted on visual crap fades and nonsense that only slow down ones work. Anyway it is much better now. Tomorrow I will have a look at the processes running and start disabling other garbage.

 

Has it occured to you that some of that "garbage" might be effectively free, or perhaps even more efficient than old methods?

Back in the days of Windows XP the CPU was doing most (if not all) of the work deciding what pixels to draw to the screen. So things were solid colours with hard edges and square corners because that was the least work for that style of rendering. Now that the GPU is doing most of the work the pipeline and inherent costs are radically different. A transparent colour or a fade animation or a round corner or whatnot are negligible costs in that style of pipeline, because the GPU is designed in a way that makes all of that stuff pretty efficient by nature. Certainly far more efficient than the CPU deciding what colour each individual pixel will be. If using alpha and not using alpha have the same effective cost, why not use alpha if it looks better or gives additional visual cues?

And personally, I find nice looking modern interfaces to be pleasant to work with. (Though I'll admit to not being a fan of the flat-colours-square-corners-borderless-icons trend that seems to be all the rage right now. The last round of UIs looked great and gave you loads of consistent visual cues to quickly and intuitively interpret what's what. For instance, pressable things were bordered and shaded so that they looked, you know, pressable. Now our desktops are loaded with flat coloured, borderless icons and if you want to see if they do anything you have to give it a go and see what happens. Am I a status icon or a button? I'm not telling, you'll have to come over here and find out for yourself..!)

 

Great question. No I never heard of such a thing. On Vista and Windows 7 the Aero and other fancy FX stuff just wastes resources and slows down everything. Disabling it increases performance noticeably. It is also one of most common Windows optimizations and found near the top of optimization lists. I just figured it would be the same with Windows 8. I'll have to do some tests.

I appreciate nice looking stuff too. It's just that simpler is better to me and "at what cost" is most important. I wouldn't have a fancy display going on for example if it was dropping performance by 10 to 20%. That is just silly to me.

 

It quite possibly could be, I've never tested it myself. Also, while I've heard some pretty compelling arguments about why some/all of the stuff could be cheap/free that doesn't mean there can't be expensive stuff coming along for the ride, too.