Virtual Machine or SAAS for Unity developement

I have a really bad computer that struggles to keep up with Unity and it takes forever to build and compile. Is there a way to like buy a Virtual Machine or SAAS, for Unity and coding in general.

Thanks

 

I'm not sure how SAAS or a VM would help you here. Unity doesn't have an SAAS service, but also it's not like remoting in to another location is going to make coding or anything much better for you. Eventually you will need to test things and you will need to consider factors like latency when it comes to coding over a remote connection.

You don't need SAAS or a VM, you need to upgrade your computer

 

Yes. A while back I spent an hour investigating cloud desktops designed to be used for development and other CPU and GPU heavy applications. My conclusion though was that the cost of them quickly exceeded that of an equivalently specced machine.

Just as an example Microsoft's Virtual Windows Desktop offering has graphics instances starting at $0.90 per hour for six cores, 56GB RAM, 340GB temporary storage, and a dedicated K80 which sounds fantastic until you look up the K80 and realize that it is SIX YEARS OLD and is at best 1/10th the performance of a modern card.

Want a modern card with good performance and features? Be prepared to pay at least $2 per hour.

An average work week that is eight hours per day five days per week is approximately 160 hours per month which comes out to anywhere from $160 to 320 depending on whether you took that modern card or not.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/windows/

Meanwhile a modest gaming laptop is only $1,200. Six modern cores (twelve threads), 16GB memory, a modern graphics card, a reasonably sized NVMe SSD.

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Predator-i7-10750H-Dual-Channel-PH315-53-72XD/dp/B08842D7JS/

At $1,200 the laptop will break even with the server somewhere between 7.5 ($160) and 3.75 ($320) months.

 

If its just the building and compiling portion which is slow and you are not doing huuuuuuge projects, just try unity cloud build? Its packaged with the unity teams at $9 a month

 

https://shadow.tech

 

Hmm seems very good information but @SunnySunshine suggested that we can use https://shadow.tech and I actually kind of like it but it says it will be available by June so idk if I want to wait that long or no. Thank for the feedback though

 

Thanks this was very useful I might actually use this in the future.

 

Great idea but I already thought about it and its not just the compiling its with building, open and closing and even saving projects it just takes too much time so I was thinking of buying a PC instead of wasting my time. I cannot even use blender but great idea.

 

Yes, that's what I was thinking too might as well spend a thousand bucks and get an OK computer.

 

... What exactly are your computers specs?

 

The money you will spend on a few months of a virtual machine useful enough to run unity, you may as well just get a new laptop. Even low-mid end will run it, if you cant even open blender then you need to upgrade not skate around it.

 

Visiting their website left me with the impression that it was too good to be true so I went digging through news articles and came across a much more in-depth explanation. For $11.99 you are getting four virtual cores, 12GB RAM, and a GTX 1080.

The GPU is solid but the other two are very low-end for game development. I'm working on a cartoonish fighting game using the new high definition render pipeline and had to upgrade to 64GB because I was regularly getting close to the limit of 32GB.

You can subscribe to a higher tier for $24.99 (more than double the base cost) which gives you access to an RTX 2080, a slightly faster processor, and double the storage but system memory only increases to 16GB. I just can't imagine the memory holding up for anything above mobile game development.

Which means you would have to subscribe to the highest tier. For $39.99 you gain a six-core CPU (still low-end for game development but you can live with it), 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and an RTX Titan GPU. You will still have the potential to hit the memory limit with this configuration for high-end games but you can get work done with it.

An equivalent laptop would be two to three thousand dollars which would take years to pay off at $40 per month and by the time you did it the server would have likely upgraded itself two maybe three times. It's a solid deal but I have to wonder what other caveats come with it that they didn't announce upfront on their website.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/...-price-lower-google-stadia-nvidia-geforce-now

 

I also think it will be a pain in the *** using these cloud services to run development environments with everything that entails, in terms of actually using engines, IDEs etc. I have used macinacloud before for mac development and in the end buying a cheap mac was a better option after a while.

 

On (somewhat) related note out of pure curiosity I've checked how much would it cost to have a Tesla V100 to train your own StyleGAN. The offers are in ballpark of $1000...$2500 per month, and on a single tesla v100 it takes 15 days to train using flickr dataset.

*sighs*

 

I'm just going to disagree with your statement on RAM needs. I think most indie devs will be perfectly happy with 16GB for creating games targeting desktop.

As far as the price of a decent game dev capable laptop, I think a lot of it comes down specifically to your GPU requirements. If your workflow doesn't depend on a lot of GPU work, you don't need to go high end, which would save considerable cost. The build/compile steps the OP is complaining about are mostly CPU and SSD heavy. There's plenty of Ryzen 4000 series laptops with dedicated low/mid tier graphics out there that work great for this, at around the $1000 USD price point. (and lacking latest gen GPU means they aren't being scooped up by miners) All depends on your specific projects though I suppose - same with my RAM comment.

 

Yeah, I agree. Happily running 16gb here with fairly large projects. It's going to depend entirely on what you're doing.

I've no idea about @Ryiah's use case, but when I talk to locals who talk about needing a lot of RAM one thing comes up in common: many dozens of constantly open browser tabs. I typically have Unity, Visual Studio, a browser with ~half a dozen tabs, and stuff like Slack, Discord, and so on running. Sometimes also a content creation tool such as Blender, Affinity Photo, something like that. Even running moderately large, multi-scene scenarios in Unity I haven't had to go past 16gb.

That said, it depends a lot on how much unique content you have in your game. Some games do need a heck of a lot of unique stuff, and that'll push your RAM requirements up very quickly. For many rookie teams I think you're likely to run into other, worse issues going down that path before your RAM matters, though - managing that scope of project, getting budget for those resources, handling inconsistencies if you're buying it off the shelf, stuff like that. If RAM does become a problem it's an easily solvable one compared to those!

 

Same. Except substitute Visual Studio for Visual Studio Code and remove Slack.

Windows has had many years to perfect memory management and we've reached the point where it can make it look like the system is running just fine with a certain amount of memory without it actually being true. I'm currently using 14GB of my 64GB running Chrome with three tabs (190MB), Discord (220MB), Unity (5GB), and Dark Souls (740MB).

That's only 6GB of the 14GB. Where is the rest of it? Windows. Windows wants more memory than it normally allows itself to have. If you have plenty to work with it will allow itself to run comfortably rather than stringently.

By the way Windows is lying about the amount of memory it has allocated. What you see reported in Task Manager is only the amount of memory actively used by apps. Windows wants to cache commonly accessed code and data into memory to further increase performance (RAM is many times faster than SSDs let alone HDDs). For my system that's currently 12GB on top of the 14GB actively used by apps.

I understand not everyone has the budget for it but memory is one of the cheapest components. If you want to increase performance it's an easy way to do so up to a point and that point in my opinion is beyond 16GB. Just keep in mind you can't easily cut off memory where you want to. I have 64GB because 48GB isn't really a thing.

 

Chrome + Unity + VS Code + unreal + Visual Studio opened simultanously (yes, that can happen) will be quite painful on a 16GB system. Actually this combo was one of the reasons why I went 32GB.

One issue is that some memory is used for file caching, meaning in case of heavy RAM usage, you'll have significantly slower program startup until the system "organizes" available RAM properly.

 

And the practical benefit to me being a user of the computer is..?

My understanding is that it'll make use of whatever unused memory it can to cache stuff in case you need it later. And sure, if the resource is there it may as well get used, no argument. But I'm not going to go and get more RAM just to give Windows more leg room to load stuff just in case.

I know that benchmarks will show that those things can drastically change measurements, and that in some use cases those will represent significant real world impact. However, what I really care about is how quickly I can do my work, and how my system feels to me as a user while I'm doing it.

Yep, I'd expect to need more RAM for a use case such as that. It's significantly more load than my case, though.

I'm not saying that nobody needs more than 16 gigs. I'm saying that presenting it as only being good enough for mobile games is probably inaccurate for many developers, particularly those who are just starting out.

 

So your saying if I were to lets say buy a gaming pc I should get a normal processor (Ryzen 5) and a normal GPU such as (Gtx 1070 or equivalent) it would be fine but I would need 64 gigs of ram?!?!?! As far as I'm concerned I will use it for game development, and playing some games such as Warzone, so I think 16 GB is fine. Let me know if you think otherwise because the main reasons I want to "upgrade" my PC is because I want to use Unity, Blender, Visual Studio , Warzone, and Epic Games launcher with some AAA titles.

 

No. When I choose components for a build I base them off of the total budget. For a system that is at most $1,000 that would be 16GB. For a system up to $2,000 it would be 32GB. Anything beyond that is 64GB.

All of the above assumes prices at their normal manufacturer recommendations and not the current absurd markup.

For game development will you be running Unity, Blender, and Visual Studio together at the same time? If the yes you may want 32GB even if you don't strictly need it.

For AAA gaming there are a few games that want more but I'm not aware of any that will fail to run with just 16GB.

 

I am thinking of getting the https://shadow.tech for like 2-3 months because that would only come out as under $100 so I can test things out and use the "full depths" of Unity and Blender and if I like it I could maybe get a $1000 budget PC build or laptop. Thanks, everyone for the advice!

 

I mean just free games that Epic gives out every week I have a couple like Battlefront 2, Hitman 1, GTA 5.

 

Let us know how it goes. While I wouldn't use it in place of my current system I definitely could see a few cases where it would be helpful (eg showing off a product without having to transport said product).

 

I would say that "good enough for most cases" is 32G, while 16G is pushing your luck. As in "it will probably work well, but things can happen."

 

Do you have an SSD?

 

Yeah. I got 16 GB mem.
But after running for a while, with many applications open, and browsers tabs, windows stores cashed mem on hard drive. So I end up in another 16 GB virtual mem. That is, when mem start going utilized above 80%, then Windows start moving less frequently used data to virtual mem.
I would say 16 GB is quite minimum to allow for comfortable work.

Also, regarding online services, with all that tools running on virtual remote pcs, need also decent and smooth network connection. Moving mouse and typing with constant lag input, will be no go. Its fine for scheduling task. But for real dev, I can imagine constant frustration, due to streeming, buffering etc.

 

You absolutely can get by on 16GB, I am on 16 right now and work on very large enterprise applications as lead developer - but if I had another 16GB it would be that much smoother.

I think 16GB is the minimum to go for, but 32 is a safe bet. I think 64GB is going overboard for a lot of developers, and shouldnt be considered the "average" requirement, its more specific to each use case.

 

Agreed, and it's very much overkill for my use case too, but memory is sold in set configurations and to have the highest performance it's best to buy an entire kit of the same modules which means that choosing 64 GB doesn't mean you needed 64 GB. It just means you needed more than 32 GB. Same applies to every other configuration.

If you want to save some money you can simply populate only half of the slots in your computer leaving the other slots to be populated if you need more. Just be aware that memory modules not in a single kit are not guaranteed to work perfectly even if they have identical models.

 

Yeah if I was on 32GB and going up 64GB would be the next stop for sure!

Generally speaking I try to go for as high quality, high frequency and decent latency memory as I can first so I tend to upgrade my ram slowly. On 16GB of monster performance RAM right now, waiting till I can afford to replace with 32GB of latest model

 

And they declared bankruptcy. Statement from them is that they're not closing down but I wouldn't be surprised if it ultimately ended them as one of their potential sources of new income isn't interested in stream gaming and the server provider has other customers that want the hardware they're renting.

https://9to5google.com/2021/03/09/shadow-game-streaming-bankruptcy/