Moving to new hardware (PC).

I always had an opinion that game developers should use best possible hardware for game development. Because powerful PC can significantly cut down development time and make game development a much more pleasant experience. At the same, while my PC was pretty decent, in 2019 it was far from bleeding edge. The main thing that was stopping me from the upgrade is the fact, that I wasn’t sure that better hardware will improve my workflow with Unity. There were some signs that it might not. For example, on my friends PC with overclocked AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, Unity Editor performance was virtually the same as on my much older PC with Intel i7 3770k . The second thing that was stopping me is the fact that I need to move to new and clean installation of windows and I understood that it will take away weeks of my time to install and configure all software that I use. Which looked like hell to me. But in the end I’ve decided to bite the bullet and build new PC. I’ve moved from PC with Intel i7 3770k to PC with Intel Core i9-9900K. I’m still in the process of moving to a new PC and reinstalling and configuring all software that I use is as time consuming as I thought, but I’m happy to report that it was worth it! Unity became much more responsive and performant. By my rough estimates, on objects with lots of components Unity interface is now 42% more responsive. Code compilation in empty scene became 3 times faster! Although code compilation, when my main scene is open, became only 25% faster.

I also moved from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and so far I’m really enjoying it. It seems that Microsoft fixed almost all interface problems that I had with Windows 7, although DPI scaling still isn’t perfect, but it is much better compared to Windows 7. I also updated my main monitor from 27 inch 60 Hz Fullhd IPS monitor to  27 inch 144 Hz QuadHD IPS. But after two weeks of using it I’ve returned it to the shop and bought 27 inch 144 Hz FullHD IPS monitor. There’s several issues that I’ve encountered with 27 inch QuadHD monitor. But the main issue I had with it, is that I don’t have good eyesight. So when I don’t use Windows scaling everything is too small for my eyesight. Theoretically Windows scaling feature should fix it and for most apps it does. Unfortunately in Unity, even with 150% scaling there’s still some text in Unity editor that is one pixel thin. And one pixel thin text on 27 inch QuadHD monitor is too small for my eyesight. I also tried 27 inch 144 Hz FullHD TN Asus monitor, but picture quality was too poor, so I had to return it. 144 Hz is the main reason why I’ve decided to buy new monitor. My friend has 85 Hz monitor and even that feels much more smooth compared to 60 Hz monitor, especially in PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS. I’ve always was very sensitive to FPS and smoothness, being able to tell the difference between 55 and 60 fps. So as soon I tried to play on 85 Hz monitor, I knew that I will greatly benefit from a 144 Hz monitor.

I didn’t sell my old PC. I will now use it as another test machine and probably as a retro gaming PC with Windows XP/7/10. By the way, for everyone who has more than one PC nearby, I would recommend software called ShareMouse that will allow use to share mouse and keyboard between two PCs, if both of those are connected to same network. You can even share it between MAC and PC.


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