HARDWARE / LAPTOP / COMPUTER for use in Unity development? Ask here! (and only here)

It's primarily custom systems. That said a decade out of an AIO is fairly unusual from what I understand with the average lifespan being 3 - 5 years. I've never tried them though as air cooling has always been sufficient for me even with my 5950X (and I'm in a silent case rather than an airflow case).

 

I use a 2060GTX and seems ideal for most things

 

Ready to move from i7-12700h laptop, to i9-13900k desktop, the processor affects performance.
Also will buy Samsung 990pro and 7200mhz 32 gb ddr5, thats has a big impact on speed.


Switched from i5-9300h to i7-12700h, difference is anourmous, from 9-13 scripts compilation, to 5-8 sec.

 

The 14900K is due out sometime in the next couple of months. It's a refresh with slightly higher performance.

 

It looks like the GPU market is better than it was in 2021 when I last asked about upgrading; is that the case? My current machine is now probably nearing its end, so I need to upgrade soon if possible.

 

Kinda. NVIDIA came out of the pandemic and last mining craze with a better understanding of just how much their customers (>90% marketshare at this point) are willing to pay for their cards. AMD is slowly being edged out of the market and so their cards are more competitively priced.

AMD's 7800 XT 16GB card will be releasing in a few days for $499. It has higher performance, higher memory bandwidth, and higher total memory than the RTX 4070 which costs $599.

 

Now GPU demand will increase toward AI processing. So I wouldn't be so sure about sensible prices in longer terms.

 

Agreed. I've seen estimates that it costs $3,000 to make an NVIDIA H100 and they're selling them for $30,000 which is far higher profit margins than they have to getting from consumer cards. At some point I expect them to take away from consumer card production just because they're selling them as fast as they make them.

 

Hello, I'm switching from my Arc770 to another from nvidia or amd (too unstable for unity editor, at this point I don't know If a editor crash is caused by me or a the graphics card). I'm looking into a 4070 or an 7800 XT. Purely from your subjective experience which one (nvidia or amd) is more stable for working in unity?

 

From my experience, generally you will find NVidia higher compatibility with Unity and other applications.

On the side note, I had one workstation with AMD GPU, as I wanted to try this family of GPUs, but had problems on one of Unreal application. After replacing with Geforce, all issues has gone.

 

NVIDIA -> AMD -> Intel integrated -> Intel dedicated.

 

IMO, people love to spend thousands of euros on hardware thats unnesecary. You can make any game you want using Unity on a second hand system that will run you less than 500$, build times will be good, so will script compilation, if you want to spend 5k-10k more just for slightly better performance, I will never understand that..

 

Sounds like the reasoning of a person who has never made anything more complex than Flappy Bird. Let me assure you that having worked on high end games targeting the latest consoles that a $500 system is basically trash for development at that level and only good for verifying if your game will run on that level of hardware.

So if you're not developing high end games cool but let's not pretend that everyone only makes simple games.

My previous system (Ryzen 5 3600 w/ 32GB RAM) took around 2.5 hours to make a build of my at the time most complex work project. My current system (Ryzen 9 5950X w/ 64GB RAM) dropped that down to around 30 mins.

At the time the pandemic and cryptocurrency were in full swing so I ended up paying $1,250 for a 5950X bundle that came with a budget gaming monitor, but the MSRP difference was supposed to have been around $500. I'm not even going to compare memory prices with how stupidly inexpensive it is right now.

If you're a professional you should always build to maximize your workflow as anything else is stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. A $500 computer will just cripple your ability to get work done in the future and who wants to hire someone that can't do their job.

I wouldn't understand it either but then if you're spending that kind of money you've done something very wrong or you have very specific requirements (eg an artist). You can achieve a massive leap in performance going from $500 to $1,000 and yet another massive leap jumping from $1,000 to $2,000.

 

Actually im working on a 3D MMO atm, but seeing as you resort to insults in your first sentence I feel like i hurt your feelings, and you got mad. Therefore I will refrain from discussing this further with yourself.

You may rest assured though that my i7 16gb ram, 2x 256gb ssd and high end nvidia card only cost me 400$, had to buy a network card separately though

The moment you take your new hardaware out of the box it drops in value by 50%, just like a new car the moment you get it. Last generation is maybe 10% less performant AT BEST, these last generations you get maybe 5-6% increase over last gen.
So IMO buying the latest gen is just dumb, just like people who buy a new iPhone the moment it comes out, LMAO, talking about sheep ....

 

I'm annoyed when people provide bad advice because then I'm left picking up the pieces while the person who gave it is long gone.

Right, what you were talking about was a system that no one can reasonably buy for $500 outside of a very lucky transaction. So now you're not just giving bad advice. You're giving deceptive advice. That's even more annoying.

 

It wasnt a fire sale at all, go on ebay or whatever your country has locally and you will find these prices everywhere.

 

No. You won't find these prices everywhere.

 

Im sure you looked in those 10 secs it took you to reply lmao
Maybe ill post some ebay screens for you since your too lazy EDIT: Thats a 1660Ti

 

literally whole pages of them

But I guess im just "talking about was a system that no one can reasonably buy for $500 outside of a very lucky transaction" - Ryiah 2023

 

Sure there are FEW of these, not like many. But these are typical hardware sold in the shopping malls, from leftovers. Or second hand, often assembled from mining hardware. Besides some lucky cases.
Which usually they put one, or two wow parameters, but saving and cheaping on other components.
Usually not providing information's about type and speed of drives. Frequency of memory. Radiators,
Expansion capacity of desktop tower. Etc.

And if to read reviews, these are not great. Surely not classified as HIGH END PCs. Maybe MID END at best.
For sure not for high capacity professional game development as it is suppose to be, per discussion.
Unless not caring about development time.

 

Yeah im sure its all used mining hardware, my bad, ill go spend 10K on a system next time instead of 500$ for a system that gives me comparable results.

 

Hi everybody, my question is: which processor is better for unity? One with more cores or one with less number of cores but more clock speed; do Unity use all the processor's cores? And the graphic card? How about Rtx 4070? 12GB is enough memory? Talking about HDRP, which is the minimum processor? I have seen the amd 7900 due to its price and low TDP. My last question is: how much RAM is needed to make Unity fly? Thank you so much.

 

Here's a modern budget system with a processor that is a little slower at single-threaded but thanks to the presence of SMT quite a bit faster in multi-threaded. An upgrade path is available to as new as a 5950X (16-core/32-thread) CPU whereas that 9700K has to be thrown away for another $500 junker.

But what do I know I'm apparently just some schmuck that spends $10K on a computer.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor ($97.00 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550M K Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($89.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: TEAMGROUP Vulcan Z 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($32.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Intel 670p 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: Asus Phoenix GeForce RTX 3050 8GB 8 GB Video Card ($209.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Phanteks Eclipse G300A (1 Fan) ATX Mid Tower Case ($44.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: EVGA 500 W1 500 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply ($53.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $568.94
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-10-10 16:20 EDT-0400

For anyone on a tighter budget that can't afford $500 here's one with integrated graphics. Fun fact by the way: the 5600G is about 20% faster than the 3600. It's actually on par with a 9900K. So if you can afford another $30 in the above system you can have a fair bit more performance.

Here's a benchmark video for the integrated graphics. It's a very solidly performing one too if you can't justify a new card, or if you just want something temporary until you've saved up for one. Just don't expect to be able to play Starfield.

Spoiler

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 3.9 GHz 6-Core Processor ($125.36 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550M K Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($89.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: TEAMGROUP Vulcan Z 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($32.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Intel 670p 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Phanteks Eclipse G300A (1 Fan) ATX Mid Tower Case ($44.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: EVGA 500 W1 500 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply ($53.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $387.31
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-10-10 16:27 EDT-0400

Sarcasm aside let's sum up what we've learned: at best used hardware just ties new budget hardware, you have no upgrade path with used, used hardware was likely mined on, and since you have no warranty if it fails you will have lost that $500.

Outside of extreme examples (eg an old Dell Precision workstation) a used computer is just a sucker's purchase.

 

Unity benefits from both and generally speaking the more expensive a processor the better it is at both single and multi-threaded work. Unless you choose older models or server grade processors it's hard to get one that favors one over the other these days.

AMD and Intel are roughly identical in performance. Intel's CPUs technically have more cores but a large number of them are efficiency cores as they're using a Big-Little architecture similar to how mobile phones have been for the past decade. You basically have to look at benchmarks to know actual performance.

My RTX 3070 8GB card was solid for my last major HDRP project which was a stylized fighting game, but it's very much a case by case basis depending on your game. An RTX 4070 or an AMD 7900 should be fine. One important thing to be aware of though: the best third party lightmapper available only supports NVIDIA.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/bakery-gpu-lightmapper-122218

For my fighting game I saw roughly 80% usage of 32GB. I'm currently on a 64GB DDR4-3600 kit because the cost is usually low enough that it's just not worth worrying about. Here's the closest one that matches mine to give you an idea of the price of these things.

https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-64gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232999

 

You will probably get CPU with at least 6 cores anyway.

Depending on your development plan, I would focus personally on higher clock.
It is not only that Unity may benefit more, even tho some processes are multithreaded, but also any other applications or games, they benefit from higher clock. Lesser of many cores.
Your OS also may reserve some core for it's own processes. For example web browser, or video recording, while running intensive application.

 

Do you think that buying a threadripper not worth it?

 

I didn't say that.
But most likely you won't see advantage of 32 cores, unless you use applications, which utilise multithreaded CPUs.

However there is higher clock version with 12 cores. So I would consider that. Also depending on your budget.

 

Threadripper's main advantage is the PCIe lanes. It's high core count is somewhat secondary. If you don't need a ton of slots available you don't really need a Threadripper. Cost is very high too as you can't really build your own as the best models are locked to OEMs and unavailable for individuals to purchase.

Technically you can buy previous generation models but they're going to perform worse than a modern consumer processor like the 7950X3D or 13900K thanks to having an out of date architecture.

 

How many cores support Unity? Ryzen 9 7900 is a very balanced CPU: low price, lw TDP; but if more cores will give me best performance, maybe i could spend much money in 7950X3D. Other programs that i use are blender 3D, photoshop, illustrator, premiere and Daz Studio.
Thank you for your repplys

 

Thank you, i like Ryzen. Another question, I compare the CPU's performance in a web that uses the passmark benchmark to test CPUs. Is a valid test for making an idea of Unity's performance?

 

You can make rough guesses with it. It's what I use for apps like Unity that don't have actual benchmarks.