Hey All!
To those of you who are doing unity and unreal on a laptop. Mine is just not up to the task, it’s about 4 years old and doesn’t seem to have the beef to get the job done.
I’m just wondering what specs I should be looking at optimally for a machine. I know with my vision I want a 17" screen but beyond that what do you all suggest?
Thanks for any help.
Rich
I cant advise you on a laptop but i can tell you that a Nvidia Geforce 2Gb 660 GTX is not enough in a desktop for the unreal course. I had to go up to a 680 GTX just so i could build terrians as it kept lagging for 3-8 seconds just trying that.
Unity runs on my laptop which is an old dual core with a mobile intergrated chipset lol (Not well but it runs!)
Other than that i really cant help other than Unreal you are going to need something meatyish on the graphics but unity although it lags can run on a fairly low spec laptop. (Hope it helps)
I’m using a laptop, over 5 years old I think now…
i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30Ghz
8GB ram
NVidia Optimus GeForce GT 540M
17" screen
Unity appears fine so far. Not tried Unreal course yet nor Blender.
My feeling was that when I get to Blender I may want (need?) a separate machine which I can push things across to for all of the rendering so that the laptop isn’t tied up for periods of time, as I use it most days for a variety of tasks.
Whenever it comes to buying a new machine I guess the only real advice would be to simply buy the highest performing machine you can with the available funds. If it takes you a year to complete a course for example, by the time you have finished, and technology and everything else moves on, your laptop is a year old already! So future proof as much as you can with the funds available.
@Marc_Carlyon That does help! I have a bit better card then that in my tower, a 960 I think it is. I’ll bear that in mind as I may upgrade my graphics card.
@Rob Thanks Rob. I am trying to stay as close to the 1k USD range as I can. My current laptop is close to yours except the screen is 15. But for some reason it takes FOREVER to load unity. To the tune of 3 or more minutes with nothing else running. I also only have 6g memory. Thanks for the advice! I tend to think short term on machines since I burn them out in a couple years as a rule for some reason, I think I’m like a computer ghoul sucking the life out of them!
Before I left, one thing I arranged in our office was the upgrade to solid state drives on all of our development PCs, everyone reported quite a significant improvement. Not wishing to put you off of the idea of a new machine, but, as an interim solution it might be worth considering, guess it would depend a bit where the current bottleneck is - seems like a long load time for Unity though, guess it depends on the project size. With the new machine, would definitely recommend the solid state drive, for the main boot drive at least…
@Rob That load time is just to get unity up so I can load a project. Projects seem to load fine.
If I run something like else like photoshop then things start to degrade. Honestly I’m not sure where the bottle neck is to be honest so I rather assumed new machine time was here.
I hadn’t considered solid state drive, I’ll look into that!
wow - that is a long time then… must be something going on in the background… always worth watching task manager and seeing what spikes when you launch it… I had to knock out a few things recently because I was getting 100% disc i/o access when trying to do certain tasks, might at least give you some satisfaction whilst deciding which awesome machine to get next 
I highly recommend this one;
…especially if you like playing chess 
AWESOME!
Love the WOPR!
I spent faaaar too much time on this, but…
https://codepen.io/deluxive/pen/lxEGs
Too much fun! (works better full screen rather than through Onebox embed)
Going from HDD to SSD easily breathes one or two more years into your current machine, it is most definitely worth looking into. Aside from that, I don’t think you will have a very large range to select from if your criteria are 17" monitor, SSD and NVIDIA GPU. Have a look at the HP ProBook 470, it looks like a fit. I’d suggest you configure it with an i5 and 16GBs of RAM, rather than i7 and 8, both of which are likely priced similarly (I haven’t had a look). Unless you’re doing threads yet, you won’t have much use for the i7 over the i5 anyway, imho - and the extra memory will pay off from day one.
Also, reconsider if laptop is what you need, or what you think you need. You can easily build a fairly powerful desktop computer within your budget, giving way much more value for money than in a laptop. And, even bigger screen, as I think that was one of your concerns. Of course, if you need to be on the move, the desktop option won’t be viable 
Hi guys,
TLDR: To improve Unity performance, look for process that are consuming resources during Unity that is not from Unity. Find out what they are and make a choice to remove if unnecessary or keep if needed.
From personal experience, I found that some background processes or software might slow down Unity. I found this out as the Build to WebGL was going very slow and even freezing. I have a high end PC, i7, GTX980ti, 16Gb RAM, SSDs etc.
During the build I looked at the processes running and consuming CPU power in Task Manager. It ended being a process called Trusteer from IBM that was causing this. It was mandatory software pushed by my bank’s online banking function as additional security. Problem is, even though you are not banking, it still scans processes and interprets internet/website traffic and blocks where it deems necessary. Building to WebGL obviously uses website resources. I uninstalled this program and immediately Unity and all its functions ran a lot faster and smoother.
Seeing that you guys are using “old” laptops, there might be a few processes running in the background that is slowing it down.
General rule of thumb has been that if you can run the game on your PC you can run the software required to build it.
Ooooh so many in my case… I have all sorts of things on here from a development perspective, including SQL Server, so it has certainly lost its “open the lid and its on” wow-factor that it had when I bought it… I recall that moment with great joy… lol
hehe, I can’t take credit for the code behind it all, just the searching and finding it plus a few text tweaks… fun though 
Odd you all mentioned this a few times. Looking at doing that last night I saw my disk had 100% and the processes running were ridiculous. I ran some utilities to try to clean things up and ended up with a boot sector error. An hour later after fixing that and getting it running again things are going much faster after a clean up.
Thanks Everyone!
I think you all just saved me a few hundred bucks for a new machine for now. Unity is now running really well with a very minimal load time.
That’s great to hear! Well done!
Laptops are becoming more and more essential as offices shift to more hybrid and remote roles. programming comes with a host of advantages, including more flexibility and flexibility in terms of work hours however, it can be challenging if you don’t have the proper equipment.
