Macbook Pro for Unity - 8 or 16gb RAM?

Hi guys,

I'm going to be mostly using this for making builds for Unity for my team. Do I need 16gb of RAM in a new Macbook Pro, or could I easily get away with 8gb?

Thanks!
Troy

 

It will all depend on the size of your project. (Not a joke; that's how Unity is set.) Same thing about the amount of video ram your graphics card has.

 

8 should be fine

 

Relatively small - all for mobile devices with a final APK at under 50 meg (for now at least). So not content heavy.

 

16.

 

I'm getting 8 vs 16

I will be using it for building a few levels myself, however not much more - apart from the iOS builds. I knew that 4 wasn't a great idea - however does 16 give a big push over 8?

 

(and to be honest I can work on my PC for level building mostly, the Macbook is MOSTLY for doing builds + other work I may need when travelling!)

 

We are working on a mobile game, as well and 8gb is comfortably enough for us (my colleague sometimes even works with 4, but that could get adventurous pretty fast once he opens more applications in addition to Unity).

So, 8 should be fine.

But if you want to use the MacBook for a few years and consider the possibility of working on larger projects or any other more RAM intensive task, you might want to get 16, just to future-proof it.

And remember: The only time you notice the amount of RAM you have is when you haven't got enough of it. There is no difference between using 6gb of RAM on a 8gb machine and a 16gb machine. But if you need 12gb, you are absolutely screwed if you only have 8.

 

Great, thanks! I am buying at a bad time I know (new Macbooks are around the corner) I just can't really wait much longer!

Yeah I'll use unity with a browser open, that would be about it I fancy.

It may be a case of selling and trading in at some point to upgrade I imagine...

 

Disclaimer: I am a huge Apple fanboy and love all my Apple devices.

If it is only for builds and light work when traveling, just get the cheapest MacBook you can. Doesn't even have to be a Pro.

However, I have a 15" 2015 MBP with top of the line specs that I love almost as much as my human baby. My previous 13" MBP had 8 GB RAM, and while it performed well for the most part, I did have a few issues using Unity 5.0 (when it first came out), where having certain things enabled such as Scene view lighting would cause the editor to crash.

With my 16 GB and dedicated GPU now, I can have Unity and a dozen other apps open and not even slowdown. I couldn't imagine using anything else as my primary development platform.

 

Why would it not need to be a Pro, surely that makes a little more sense...?

 

I assumed the standard MBs were a bit cheaper, but I see now that the base MB and MBP cost the same. Guess it's just form factor vs a bit more power.

In that case, definitely go with the cheapest MBP (if you don't want to convert to be one of us)

 

Is it possible to upgrade down the road? Some of Apple's laptops have soldered memory.

 

All of them do now. Pre-2015 you could upgrade RAM and I think hard disk yourself, but now it's all permanent. Good catch, this is one of the things I wanted to bring up but forgot.

 

Are you likely to build big enough projects to require 16GB anytime before it's time to upgrade the laptop again? If not, do you have enough "fun money" you can spare to get the 16GB version anyway? If not, go with 8GB. You might not want to bake lightmaps on it anyway, just design and offload the heavy tasks to your desktop.

 

...I went for the 15inch with 16gig of ram. Sorted! Thanks all

 

Yo Schneider, I've never owned a Mac. I really enjoy my iphone so I wanted to know what having their laptops would be like. Right now I use an Alienware 13 R2. Dual Core 2.4, 960m, 16gb ram, 4 hour battery life. I'm in love with this thing besides the battery. I make desktop games, would I be happy with the pro 13? (I never use my DGPU unless I'm gaming.) IGPU is HD520, without checking benchmarks I think it's around an Iris 6100.

How much battery life would I get 30-50% screen brightness, Unity, MonoDevelop, Youtube, 2-3 web pages and gimp simultaneously?

 

You'll be able to shift tasks between your phone and your laptop. Send and receive SMS through the laptop if the phone is nearby, move projects you're working on between mobile and desktop versions of apps, in addition to the stuff you can already do (calendar sharing and all that).

With Unity running, far less than any of the other programs alone. You can play video all day (maybe not HEVC!), but Unity will really drain the battery, even just sitting in the editor. I get 10-12 hours out of typical use with my 13.1" MBP, but under half that just doing simple things in Unity (recompiling scripts fairly often). In special circumstances I get over 20 hours (not actually using the laptop, just having it download updates and turning on the screen to check status). These special circumstances were even while running Linux VMs. The cable for the charger on MacBooks is ridiculously long, so it won't usually be an issue if you're near power.

The number of webpages don't matter in Safari at least, as it shuts down inactive browser tabs (or at least the latest beta does). Chrome is notorious for being a hog, so it would be detrimental to your battery life in its current iteration. Anything using OpenGL or Metal should also be basically running in headless mode when its window is fully obscured. Activity Monitor stats tell me they didn't exaggerate the usefulness of this.

I keep my laptop screen around 2-5 pips out of 16 most of the time, brighter as needed on rare occasions.

 

8GB should be fine for just building small projects - most of the pure coders I know just use Mac Minis even (and work on PC).

However you (as they do) will likely come to a point where you're having to work on the Mac to closely debug and basically save time. That's when you'll appreciate the higher-end options. Just a shame that Apple charge a big premium on extra RAM (and yeah it's soldered).

Personally unless you absolutely need to be mobile, I'd recommend an iMac. Get an 8GB model and upgrade to 32GB at your leisure.

 

I'm working on two machines depending on platform i'm developing and requirements. (PC and Macbook)

For Apple devices i use: Macbook Pro (Late 2011) i7 2.7Ghz and 8GB RAM. It works fine, but if you are concidering 8 vs 16 RAM it's not that much important as it is to have an SSD. Projects grow in size very fast and that's where SSD is life saver.

 

Thanks very much orb, that was very insightful. It's a shame Unity drains the battery so fast. I was hoping for double time with such a big price tag. I manage to get 4 hours with all those programs, because I set the brightness to 20%, set the performance to battery saver, disable the DGPU and turn off the keyboard lights. As the machine gets older I suspect it'll last only 2 hours.

How does your mac run with Blender? Preferably your IGPU.

 

Blender doesn't work with IGPU, it's either full gpu or cpu

Correct me if this has changed

 

Blender definitely uses the HD4400 in my Surface Pro 3 for graphics acceleration.

Not sure if it can GPU accelerate Cycles, though.

 

Is that viewport acceleration or blender internal renderer? (does anyone still use that?)

 

Max possible ram is always the answer.

Always.

Your CPU clock speed and cores may be a factor in determining your computer's speed, but the amount of ram you have determines your level of baller status.

 

Especially on a computer where the memory is soldered into place.

 

Yeah, thats one I learned the hard way

It's annoying, because only one of the ram sticks in my laptop is soldered in, so I could hypothetically upgrade ONE of my sticks, but not the other, which just seems so pointless, when I know this laptop's motherboard is capable of supporting 16gb. I went with 8 when I bought this laptop years ago, I assumed I could upgrade the ram later, I only found out after I was using it that one of the sticks was soldered in.

So yes, ALWAYS max ram from now on for me, ha ha

 

Viewport.

I don't use the internal renderer anymore. I also never knew of it ever being GPU accelerated.

 

If you can go with 16, I would do that. OSX is notorious for eating memory with updated releases. My old 4 GB macbook pro was unusable within 18 months after two major OSX updates. My current 8 GB is is showing it's age.

 

Goodness.. Although Windows 10 is consuming 2.7 gb ram as I write this with only one chrome page open.

The battery life in Mac is the biggest disappointment to me. I thought it could last a lot longer than 4-5 hours game dev. I'll just stick with Alienware a couple years.

 

Windows and OSX both aggressively cache things so that memory actually gets used instead of sitting there doing nothing. It should be using more memory by default.

 

I might just get a Razer for my next system - expensive but better value than a mac for hardware.

 

Far worse quality though. Razer is notorious for hardware that simply doesn't last long.

 

All you really need to do is see a Razer product in person to know you definitely don't want one.

A lot can be said about Mac's hardware, but one thing you can't say is that it feels like it's going to shatter into a million pieces in your hands like the flimsy water bottle plastic Razer stuff is made out of. Their products probably do so well with younger users because it reminds them of the plastic toys they grew up with.

 

I purchased their tv system awhile back and the hardware was very poorly made.

I've also heard their laptop's black aluminium peels revealing the silver underneath.

 

My experience with them is restricted to the Naga mouse. I bought two of them and both of them started falling apart after only months of use (the scroll wheel broke within a few months, the buttons stopped working properly after a year, etc). I have friends who have had similar experiences with their products.

By comparison my Logitech G600 mouse was half the price and is still working perfectly after a year.

 

My experience was with a keyboard. After getting replaced it still didn't work, and in the middle we got messed around by tech support telling us to try silly things (like updating drivers, even though we'd established that it was already misbehaving before the OS even loaded).

 

I can't say 8GB has been a problem for development personally. When I need more than 8, I use a desktop computer with more - and it's only for audio work that I push against the limit. Flatlander, you see, so no heavy 3D requirements

If your OS X installation is getting sluggish there's something wrong. It CAN happen over time through installation and uninstallation of certain things, but sometimes you might want to check system logs for I/O errors, or reboot into single-user mode to do a full fsck.

My desktop has gone through many upgrades since 2013 without issues (and it has a Samsung EVO), while my laptop had its only full reinstallation (wipe + fresh OS, no settings imported) 17 months ago. Both are working fine, and any sluggishness on my desktop is due to running a beta OS with far more logging and bugs than usual

 

Are you seriously acting like a thread on a game development forum is populated by people who don't know the difference between a CPU and a GPU?

 

Removed off topic posts. No holy war derails.

 

Has anyone recommended 32GB RAM yet?

OK, well I ain't reading all that given the prior post - 32GB RAM.

 

I hate developing on 8GB devices. 16gb is bare minimum for me, and 24 or 32 is *so* much smoother.

 

You can't upgrade an MBP, so if you're buying such an expensive machine, make sure the specs are good enough to last.

8GB may be fine working on small mobile games... but what if you want to work on something bigger in a year or so?

 

Sorry, I thought the CPU speed was the RAM speed. Now I know CPU and RAM are different. Because I never did remember all the computer specs off from my head. Before I was confuse that CPU can also be a memory speed like the computer memory ram speed.

I think you should buy more RAM, because RAM is not that expensive as cpu or graphic cards.

 

Of course it is upgradeable. In fact it is pretty common practice, if you are buying a new one, to get the lower ram/ssd, and upgrade them after. Memory and drive space are cheaper pretty anywhere other than Apple's site. 8gb is usable, but 16gb is much better, especially if you have a ton of apps running at the same time (maya/unity/ps/ai/etc).

 

On many models that's no longer possible because they're soldered on rather than plugged in. When we purchased iMacs at work a couple of years ago the configuration page was very clear that we should apply upgrades now because we physically wouldn't be able to later.

It's supposedly to help them make the devices smaller, but I'd be shocked if forcing people to buy from Apple rather than do exactly what you described wasn't also an influence.

Edit:

I'm interested to know what you're developing if it genuinely makes any noticeable difference. Or is it a bazillion open browser tabs?

In any case, it's moot. 16 gigs is the max for current Macbook Pro models.

 

Wow. That is buried fairly deep. Mine is from late last year, and it was just a couple of screws to pop in the 16gb. That is kinda lame.

 

Yeah! From memory it wasn't buried that deep when we got our iMacs. I think it was even highlighted in red. That was quite a while ago, though, so I could be wrong.

 

Yeah most new iMacs, mac minis and MacBooks are not user-serviceable in any capacity.
So if you want to use it for work get the best unit you can afford.
If you use it, Android Studio is a hog so the more RAM the better.
As a build server alone, the cheapest mac mini works just fine.
Yeah, it's S***ty, but unfortunately that's how it is. Apple shareholders & employees need to eat too, you know /s
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165
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