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Buying a New Laptop for Game Development

Started by January 03, 2015 05:17 PM
8 comments, last by Gian-Reto 9 years, 8 months ago

I am a student who's intending to move into game development (I am planning on trying OpenGL, Unity, DirectX etc.). I am thinking of investing on a new laptop that would allow me to start with it. I am also a gamer who would like to play new games with great graphics. So considering both these facts, I would like to get your idea on what would be a good laptop for me. My budget is between 2000$ - 2500$. I am currently considering laptops with GTX 980M (such as MSI GT72 Dominator Pro) or Dual GTX 970M SLI such as (Aorus X7 Pro).

So I would like to get your opinion on what would be a good choice? Would having a Dual GPU Setup benefit me when it comes to Game development in any case? or having a single yet superior GPU (in 980M) is enough? Or should I go for a laptop with a Nvidia Quadro GPU (Which I do not think is ideal when it comes to gaming)? I would really appreciate your suggestions on this smile.png.

Plus, I would like to get your opinion on the CPU, GPU, HDD or SSD, and RAM that would be ideal for Game development.

Thank you in advance! :)

It's been a while since I last purchased a new laptop, but I would go and look up specs for laptops purposefully branded as a gaming laptop such as those from alienware, but not buy from them. Once i know what specs they call a gaming laptop, look for laptops with similar spec elsewhere that aren't branded specifically as a gaming laptop. Graphics are always the sore point, is there a reason you want a laptop rather than a small desktop able to house a good high end graphics card and lots of ram?
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Hi Thank you for your reply! :)

Yes. I am not thinking of getting a desktop mainly due to the fact that I have to travel a lot, which is a shame really, as I know a desktop would serve me better in terms of performance for the amount of money I am spending. However, I am forced to get a laptop because of the said reason.

As you said, I have actually been looking at the gaming laptops and is thinking between the MSI GT72 Dominator Pro (With GTX 980M GPU) and AORUS X7 Pro (With 2x GTX 970M SLI). So I was wondering if there's any particular benefit in terms of performance in having 2 GPUs when it comes to game development? or having a single, yet superior GPU is enough? I know when it comes to gaming, that not all the titles are optimized to get the use of 2 GPUs, so is it the same when it comes to game development?


I have actually been looking at the gaming laptops and is thinking between the MSI GT72 Dominator Pro (With GTX 980M GPU) and AORUS X7 Pro (With 2x GTX 970M SLI).

Twin 970M in SLI is certainly a little more powerful than a single 980M. That said, many games will not take full advantage of SLI, so your mileage will vary in practice.

As far as game development goes, GPU power is pretty much irrelevant - you aren't likely to be building the next Crysis off the bat, nor to have an art team capable of stressing a modern GPU.

If you are building the next Crysis, then pick up a cheap laptop for travel, and spend your hard earned cash on a desktop.

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

hi,

you might also consider including a big SSD hard drive, because those 2.5" hard drives are really slower than the desktop ones... and it might get frustrating on big development projects dry.png

(by the way, if I were you, I would pick a great desktop gaming computer for about 1200$ which would stay at home, and a decent laptop for game development for about 800$, and use some sort of cloud or vnc to syncronize development projects... or even an external usb hard drive ? ...but maybe I'm too stingy to buy a 2000$ laptop which will lost half its value each year ? happy.png )

anyway, don't forget that you might want to save money for unity licensing and graphic & audio resources (unless you do all by yourself or find a team).

Thanks guys for your inputs! :)

After considering them, I thought of going for a laptop under 1000$ (and building a rig later on). So when doing some research, I found out that laptops with Radeon graphic cards are much lower in price when compared to Laptops with Nvidia GPUs. For instance, a laptop with a R9 M290X costs around the same as a laptop with a Nvidia GTX 860M, which is considerably lower when it comes to performance. So I would like to know if having Radeon graphics becomes a bottleneck for game development in any way? for instance, do OpenGL, Unity, DirectX, etc. supports Radeon Graphic cards?

I would like to get your opinion on this! :)

Thank you!

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So I would like to know if having Radeon graphics becomes a bottleneck for game development in any way? for instance, do OpenGL, Unity, DirectX, etc. supports Radeon Graphic cards?
Actually Radeon GCN cores are pretty much the same you find in modern consoles... and in most, if not all AMD products at all price segments from the 30 bucks APU to the 1000+ server-side compute card. By contrast NV has been churning out slightly different architectures one after another, the last iteration is debatably superior at last.

The problem with regards to Radeons are drivers. Radeons and mobile... I cannot tell if they solved their problems but I'm not going to put my money on it yet.

The mileage will vary. A lot. Even when switching driver versions. You'll hopefully never be left with a completely dysfunctional laptop but quirks are known to happen when you work on the edge. I wouldn't expect many problems on basic usage.

As a side note, I have bought two laptops so far. One was techincally a "netbook". They both sucked but I have to say the netbook sucked less as it had a very important thing: real portability. As a result, I found it to be very slow... the laptop is so heavy I just don't even bother carrying it around.

Previously "Krohm"

Thanks guys for your inputs! smile.png

After considering them, I thought of going for a laptop under 1000$ (and building a rig later on). So when doing some research, I found out that laptops with Radeon graphic cards are much lower in price when compared to Laptops with Nvidia GPUs. For instance, a laptop with a R9 M290X costs around the same as a laptop with a Nvidia GTX 860M, which is considerably lower when it comes to performance. So I would like to know if having Radeon graphics becomes a bottleneck for game development in any way? for instance, do OpenGL, Unity, DirectX, etc. supports Radeon Graphic cards?

I would like to get your opinion on this! smile.png

Thank you!

The only problem you might face is that some applications, especially graphics programs, use GPGPU for accelerating certain parts of image creation / modelling / whatever.

Most of these applications, especially the non-Pro ones not written solely for Pro grade GPUs (very expensive), are primarly using CUDA for offloading work to the GPU. CUDA is a Nvidia only technology, you will not be able to use it on Radeons.

So most programs that only support CUDA will just not give you the option of using GPU acceleration in these cases, which means some operations or filters run slower on a Laptop with a Radeon than on a Laptop with a Nvidia Graphics card.

None of this should stop you though from getting a Laptop with Radeon card. CUDA Acceleration can be quite a speed up, but because people are not happy with openGL yet and CUDA is Nvidia only, GPGPU is hardly used. And even where it is used you usually only get the speed up for part of the workflow, so while rendering might take half the time on the GPU, the whole modelling process might still be running completly on the CPU, making the time saved in rendering more or less 10% of the total time or less.

I wouldn't worry about it.

Radeons support all the same Graphics APIs as Nvidia cards, some features are different but AFAIK both companies are quick to catch up and fix bugs in the drivers (I know some people seem to claim the opposite).

Unity runs just fine on Radeons. It even runs without a hitch on Intel iGPUs, just try not to stress it too much. But the basic DX and OpenGL support is more or less the same no matter if Nvidia, AMD or Intel.

One thing to note is, SLI and CFX both to my knowledge are ONLY usable if Nvidia / AMD has added a profile for the game to their drivers. Else the game, for example whatever you build with unity, will never see more than a single card.

In some other scenarios, a second card MIGHT be of some limited use.

Some applications that use CUDA acceleration as described above might have included schedulers of their own design to distribute workload among the cards available in the system. To my knowledge there is no general solution from Nvidia on that yet, so good luck finding any application whose devs went through the hassle of writing this kind of two tier schedulers for the tiny niche of people with multiple GPUs in their Systems.

Then there is the possibility of using a second Nvidia card as PhysX card to offload physics calculation to in games that support it. Note that this ONLY works with 2 nvidia cards, as Nvidia disables PhysX support on their cards if an AMD card is in the System.

And the last thing: you might want to make sure your GPU has enough VRAM. Not only for playing / testing games, but again, some applications are actually using VRAM for other stuff.

Some modelling apps can be quite VRAM hungry when you start cranking up the polygon count on a high poly model. Because of that reason I finally exchanged my GTX 580 for GTX 970 this year. GPU wise the GTX 580 was still going strong for my purposes, but the VRAM was just too small for some of the higher resolution sculpts in my modelling app of choice.

Lucky most newer cards come with ample VRAM space.... just make sure yours get 2-3G at minimum, so you don't hit a VRAM wall down the line and have to compromise because of that.

I am a student who's intending to move into game development (I am planning on trying OpenGL, Unity, DirectX )

Something here is not like the others ... can you spot what does not belong ?

Also - if you are going to be focusing on graphics, you will have to pay attention to the graphics card + how much RAM is available.

In a laptop, this can cost you a lot of $$$ - about $2,000 - $3,000 USD.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Also - if you are going to be focusing on graphics, you will have to pay attention to the graphics card + how much RAM is available.

In a laptop, this can cost you a lot of $$$ - about $2,000 - $3,000 USD.

Well, that depends really on what exactly his target is... low end 3D Graphics can run on a low budget laptop nowadays.

I am able to run 3D Coat, a 3D modelling and texturing tool that is quite hardware intensive, on my Windows 7 tablet, which has only an old intel iGPU, 4G RAM and a 4 years old mobile i5... as long as I keep my subdivision / voxel resolution from going overboard, I can run it without any problem at all.

I also ran some Indie 3D games on it.... no problem.

So really, you need to be aware of what you want to achieve. If you try to work on the next AAA level graphics.... yeah, 2000$ is still quite cheap for such a workstation. And it is not wise to try to get such a powerful laptop when a more powerful desktop would cost less.

If you just want to mess around with some light 3D Modelling and are not to worried about getting the highest poly count, all the post processing possible and millions of objects onscreen... a much cheaper laptop will do.

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