AMD or Intel for game dev (Unity/Visual Studio project builds)?

Shifty Geezer

uber-Troll!
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I asked this on the Unity forums and got very little attention which is a shame as you'd have thought people would have experience across hardwares, so I'll see if anyone here has some good insight for a new PC who's primary requirement is to build (Unity) projects as quickly as possible at a good economy.

I believe the build process is inherently single threaded, so the i7 (10k) clocking higher is the better option? But then if the difference is marginal and AMD is notably cheaper (?), that'd be bad economy. Drive performance will be NMVe, probably a Sammy 970 EVO Plus. Does AMD or Intel have a RAM speed advantage? Are there any chipset considerations that can make a real difference?

Oooo, I wonder if @sebbbi has any opinion?
 
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is that the threadripper?

damn.. so sad. I thought getting a better CPU would solve my problems, LOL.. perhaps not
 
Single threaded performance it is! Does Intel have a significant speed<>cost ratio for single threaded performance?
 
Well it did boost from 3.63 GHz to 4.01 GHz.
 
In unity it does not matter much, even on large projects compile times are a couple of seconds.
Unreal engine OTOH where it could be minutes then it’s important

Startup time there is a difference, here’s exactly the same app in Unity.


intel i5-8259U 2.3 ghz (boost 3.8ghz) 4 cores/8 threads (this machine has a faster ssd btw) ~7 seconds
AMD 5 3600 3.6 ghz (no boost) 6 cores/12 threads ~3 seconds

I would go with AMD, dont even think about it

btw I just remembered my intel CPU is downclocked 25% (cause the fan was making too much noise)
 
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In unity it does not matter much, even on large projects compile times are a couple of seconds.
When was the last time you used Unity and for what platforms? I'm encountering 10 minute platform builds for ionAXXIA depending on platform. DOTS is supposed to have lengthy build times.
 
you are talking about full builds, not development builds, yes of course those are way way longer due to the packing of assets / compilation of shaders etc but thats not your meat and potatos in development time
though 10 minutes for
seems to be excessive (unless you're building it on a calculator :mrgreen:)

Perhaps everything aint set up optimally (sticking too much in the resources directory perhaps?)
 
That's just the build process for Android and Windows Store/XB. Packaging and whatnot takes forever. Android builds are quick so long as you don't use their .aap format.

And you're right, dev builds are the important one for iteration. But long deployment builds are still an issue for testing and debug purposes. Porting to Xbox took a long time simply because it was 10 minutes minimum for each 'build > run > find bug > change one line of code' cycle (to trace the problem to the tools...)
 
shifty.png

OK I just built my game with Unity, 90+% of the time is compiling shaders, and as you can see it does take advantage of all the cores
 
Shifty if you have a project that you want me to compile on both the AMD & intel I can report back the build times for both systems
 
Cheers. I don't because my main concern is the DOTS system which I'm not using yet. Unity say it can take longer.

Ooo, I wonder if the DOTS FPS example is a good test case? If you've access to two systems, could you benchmark that? Maybe we can start a thread on the Unity forums to get people posting build benchmarks using Unity tutorial projects?
 
yes (also the ryzen 5 3600 had some stuff in the background running perhaps affected the numbers a bit)
 
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

seems AMD have better performance per dollar for single thread. But amd is slower than intel for single thread.

Intel Core i9-10900KF @ 3.70GHz
(85%)
3,168
$463.00*
(10c)

AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
(74%)
2,743
$326.99
(8c)

shifty.png

OK I just built my game with Unity, 90+% of the time is compiling shaders, and as you can see it does take advantage of all the cores

out of topic: curious, why are you still using the old ms edge?
 
out of topic: curious, why are you still using the old ms edge?
The browser? No idea

Actually strange thing happened to me yesterday, I was compiling a c++ console application that I wrote, I just wanted to do some calculations quickly, and windows complained about the generated exe containing a virus, WTF
I'll post a screenshot later but very strange
 
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