What should I be looking for in a game dev computer? Just kinda curusis as I am saving for one
This is quite an open ended question and it doesn’t really have an answer. Depends on what kind of game you want to make. If you just want to make a simple 2D game, even an outdated PC can help you achieve that. You shouldn’t look for hardware to “make games”, you should look for hardware that has good support, is relatively recent, and runs well on whatever OS you want to use. (For example, if you want to run Linux, it’s probably better to go with AMD GPUs)
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Just don’t use an 14 year old hp laptop that doesn’t have support for vulkan graphics. I’m not speaking from experience, you are speaking from experience!
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Get a computer that plays the kinds of games you want to make. You’ll be fine.
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The general recommendation is that the computer should be one level (step) higher (more powerful) than the target platform (the system on which the game is expected to run smoothly). This is because optimization is the final stage, and hardware should not significantly limit development. In other words, during development, you will be running an unoptimized version.
But you only need to buy a computer for development when it is absolutely clear that the game can bring guaranteed income (which is practically impossible) or you don’t mind spending money on an experiment.
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Very good recommendation since there is no need for additional resources during development.
Your PC has to handle just the editor+game+tools. You haven’t optimized during dev. Logging. Debug binaries. Have you ever opened an Unreal project on a target system you play on? I guess not.
No one is coming to Godot to create a AAA game on their own. They are specifically NOT opening up Unreal - which yes, is a resource hog. They are opening up Godot. Which will run on freaking anything. Yes, more RAM will help. Yes, a better video card will help.
I didn’t say build the slowest, crappiest computer that meets the minimum specs you want. I said get a computer that runs the games you want to make. It’s going to be more computer than you need to develop anything but a AAA games.
I’ve been on these forums consistently for over a year and a half, and I’ve read a lot and answered a fair number of questions. The only time anyone has performance issues with Godot is when they have a memory leak that they need to fix, or they’re pushing a HUGE number of 3D models through the engine - in the order of 10s of thousands. In the first case, they need to fix their code. For the second, they typically need to go to Unreal for that kind of performance (because even Unity can’t handle that). In the rare case that someone is targeting low-end hardware, well, they know what they’re getting into.
For the record, I like to optimize as I go. And plan ahead architecturally. You should see my wall. It’s got a whiteboard and the rest is covered in UML diagrams on colored 3x5 index cards. Logging has logging levels for a reason. In fact, we were just discussing that in another thread today. Debug binaries are actually quite reasonable for Godot compared to other languages I’ve used in the past.
And to answer your rhetorical question, I’ve been using Unreal since '99, and it will in fact run on the target system for a game. You just may have to close the other programs like Maya/Blender to get it to run. But these days processors have a lot more cores and are much better at creating page files because HDD access speeds are so much faster.
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lol hope that energy is well spend. Sometime this forum is just funny
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