You need a Workstation that suits your needs and goals to make the most of Unity’s powerful development engine. Whether you are creating 3D games, apps, and experiences for entertainment, film, automotive or architecture, you can work faster and better with a purpose-built Workstation for Unity.
This article will guide you through the main components to consider when choosing the best Workstation for Unity.
How to choose the best CPU for a Unity Workstation?
The CPU is one of the most important components for any Unity Workstation. As a result, we always suggest spending a good amount of your budget on it. Since Unity was designed originally for game development, it works very well on Intel’s Core™ range. With high clock speeds and enough cores and threads for most projects, we advise customers to buy a Workstation based on the latest Intel® Core™ processor.
If you do a lot of multi-threaded tasks in Unity, such as light baking and progressive lightmapping, consider thinking about a processor with more cores and threads. The AMD Ryzen™ range has good single-core speeds and multi-threaded performance, making them solid all-rounder processor Unity Workstations.
AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Pro and Intel® Xeon® W Series processor range offer much more performance for multi-threaded workloads in Unity. However, these processors are much more expensive and run at slower clock speeds. Therefore, we would only suggest these Workstations to Unity users who spend most of their time lightmapping.
How to pick the best GPU for a Unity Workstation?
Your Graphics card or GPU is essential for smooth Frame rates (FPS) and a good user experience in Unity. As of Unity version 2019.3, ray tracing is also now available to developers. By leveraging this technology, users can use enhanced light to create visually amazing scenes.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards are also fully VR ready. So if you want to use this exciting and immersive technology, then your next Unity Workstation with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics is good to go.
Do you need Professional NVIDIA or AMD Radeon Pro Graphics for Unity Workstations?
Unity was mainly designed for game development, so it works very well on graphics cards made for this market. Professional NVIDIA RTX (formerly Quadro) and AMD Radeon™ Pro work fine with Unity but do not give you the same value for money / performance as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards.
However, some professional applications benefit from the ISV certification and the more stable optimised drivers that professional NVIDIA and AMD cards offer. If your other applications need professional graphics, we suggest Professional NVIDIA RTX over the AMD Radeon™ Pro options.
How much memory (RAM) do you need for a Unity Workstation?
The memory you need depends on your specific projects and can vary greatly.
Most of our customers, however, are happy with 16-32GB for general projects, and if you work on large files with complex lighting effects, then 64GB may be needed.
All our Workstations can be installed with at least 128GB+ system memory should you need more.
How to choose the best storage configuration for a Unity Workstation?
We suggest a 2-3 drive configuration, starting with an NVMe Solid State Drive (SSD). NVMe drives are the fastest storage drives available today. We suggest one of these drives for your Operating System, application installs and active project files. Using an NVMe SSD as your main system drive ensures smooth operation, quick boot times and fast application/project loading times.
You could add another Solid State Drive (SSD) dedicated drive for your active project files to optimise performance further.
We suggest adding a high-capacity traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) for long-term bulk storage. These drives are slow compared to the flash-based SSD drives available today. But they have large capacities and low cost per GB, which makes them very useful as a storage drive.
