PC (Windows) Vs Mac for game devlopment

Hi! I am planning on buying a new laptop. This is for other work too, but I plan to use it for game development/
*Note*- I already have a windows for game development, but I want something portable. My other work an be done on mac and windows.

I wanted to know if I should buy a windows or a mac, I was thinking windows because I can get very good specs for a cheaper price than mac, and mac is nowhere near a GTX 1050/1080 as of now.

I am focusing on 3 main things-
Portability - not very important but it will be better if its something light
Cost*- important
Specs*- important

 

This is what someone recommended and I find the specs pretty good for the price

 

I highly recommend steering clear of the current generation of laptops using AMD CPUs. AMD's 4000 series of laptops will be here in a couple months and every indication is that we'll be jumping from four cores to as high as eight cores. The ROG Zephyrus G is acceptable for now but at best it will only match the weakest 4000 CPU.

My recommendation for people who need a laptop right now is the Acer Predator Helios 300 as it will age far better than the above laptop thanks to six cores instead of four. Yes, it comes with a smaller SSD but that's trivial to upgrade, and it makes up for it with 16 GB of RAM which is basically the minimum these days.

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Predator-i7-9750H-Keyboard-PH315-52-78VL/dp/B07QXLFLXT/

 

If cost and specs are important then don't bother with a Mac. They've never really been the best for costerformance, even after the Intel switch all those years ago, but now they're dramatically worse. You could buy three Windows based laptops for the price of the entry level MacBook Pro 16 and get the same performance.

 

Only speaking from personal experience here but if I wasnt coding for iOS I wouldnt bother with a mac.
You can get a far superior PC for the money and for me speed is everything. Thats cpu speed, gpu speed and HD speed.
Sadly I've saddled myself with an iOS project (my last) and have an amazing PC and a crappy mac mini which is not worth the effort/money.
If you are working towards iOS spend as much as you can on a decent mac. ie dont get a mac mini - its nothing more than a paper weight.
Oh, and dont rely on cloud build to help bail you out if you have a rubbish mac. My project takes 9 hours to build via cloud and 15mins on a mac mini.

 

I disagree. For the purposes of building binaries and signing them the Mac Mini is the best offering available from Apple right now because you're not paying for features you don't need.

A baseline Mac Mini costs $800 and comes with four cores whereas a baseline iMac costs $1099 and comes with only two cores. Yes, the Mac Mini comes with only 128 GB storage compared to the 1TB of the iMac, but it's a very high speed SSD instead of the iMac's pathetic 5400 RPM HDD.

Best of all it's extremely small (7.7 square inches or 19.7 square centimeters) and lightweight (2.9 lbs or 1.3 kg) making it very portable if you need to be able to take a machine with you but don't need the battery life of a laptop.

 

Hey @Ryiah,

Sorry I have to disagree
Do you use one?

Yes you are better off with a Mac Mini than a $1099 iMac but a $1099 iMac is not a decent mac either.

How often do you create a project on a PC then transfer it to the mac and find it works perfectly and needs no work done to optimize or bug fix?

I'm working on a fair sized project at the moment (11gb) and unfortunately I have an iOS crash so I have to investigate on the mac mini and the wait times are unbearable.

If you are making small projects then you can probably get away with one for builds and signing but having had to buy one as an emergency build machine because my iMac died I can honestly say never again.

BTW I'm not one of these PC are better than mac's people. I loved my iMac when I got it several years ago and it was a dream to use with Unity - my mac mini though is another thing altogether :/

 

No, but one of my team mates uses one in conjunction with a high-end PC and my opinion above is largely based off of his comments about the experience.

That said I'm always looking for more experiences and I'll keep yours in mind for when I finally get around to purchasing my own hardware from them.

Same. My motivations are generally aimed at the best value but there are times when I do want the best performance.

 

Buy what you prefer to work with. Specs don't really mean much if you aren't performing at top speed. If you haven't used either enough to already know what works for your, then it isn't important, you won't be taxing either. Get the cheapest possible.

 

Macs have two main advantages: They allow you do develop for iOS, and they handle high-DPI screens better than Windows.

If you don't need those and want some GPU power, Windows is probably the way to go.

 

You generally get more for your money with a PC. Mac IL2CPP standalone builds, as well as iOS builds require a Mac.

 

It seems like you could develop an iOS app on the PC and then just use a Mac for making builds.

 

I agree that you get a lot more value with a PC. I just bought one of these for my son and then bought 32GB RAM for $100. He's really happy with it:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/gam...aptop/spd/g-series-15-3590-laptop/gn3590dovds

They have one available at the outlet for even cheaper:
https://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlin...b88q2idZdGvrnT2YszSRnGMsepx5cTrecFkSi4HZlsu8=