What PC specs are most important for making games in Unity?

Hello there. I'm a student and I'm very interested in making games on Unity. I want to buy a notebook for work and study, but I'm quite bad at PC specs. I dont really know what should I go for. I was thinking about Microsoft Surface Pro, but will it be okay to work in Unity without proper GPU?

 

For development specs the game you are working on will be what sets the system requirements. Unity itself is very light and can run on practically anything made in the past decade, but a project can go anywhere from very light to very heavy.

For an idea of what you need for your project check out games that are similar to the ones you want to make and add a little bit more on top of that for the editor itself and any tools you might need open (eg Visual Studio).

Some members of our community (eg @angrypenguin) use it as a secondary system. I don't know how comfortable it would be for any long term use, but it should be powerful enough for mobile and light PC games.

 

Thanks a lot

 

It depends entirely on what you're doing.

As a secondary system I find my Surface Pro 4 to be great, but it's certainly not got the grunt to play anything but light 3D games, and that will impact your development productivity for some things.

Note that "playing" and "developing" have different requirements! Personally, I use my Surface when I'm on the go but still want to be productive - I can write code, do some testing, edit levels, stuff like that. I can do all of those things without being upset if the game doesn't run at a smooth 30 or 60hz, and I happily do a lot of it in a pretty small window.

If you already have a reasonably specced desktop and want something super portable then I highly recommend the Surface. If you need something that's more of an all-rounder, or if its going to be your only or main machine and you want to do 3D stuff, then I'd go for something with a discreet GPU. Also, if you don't like working on small screens that'll be an issue. As it is, on my Surface I turn Windows's default scaling down a bit.

Note that there are devices in the Surface series which have discreet GPUs. However, you're paying an incredibly high premium there, so consider carefully whether the Surface-specific features are that important to you. If not, a standard laptop is probably much better bang for your buck.

 

Guess Its better for me to watch for something else then... Sadly, Surface is not selling in my country officially, and I also have some 3D project in mind. Thank you for your help

 

Unity performance generally improves with additional CPU cores, more RAM, SSD storage, and at least a not terrible video card. As already mentioned, the project itself really dictates your requirements.