• Question: would it be better to invest in a better computer when making games?

    Asked by A.Derbyshire on 17 Oct 2024.
    • Photo: Aurelia Brzezowska

      Aurelia Brzezowska answered on 17 Oct 2024:

      From someone who swapped from a laptop to high-spec PC when I entered University the answer is definitely a yes. But remember that you don’t need it to be the BEST. It needs to do the work you need it to. For game creation, go for a powerful GPU and CPU (preferably not Intel gen 13 or 14 due to the issues with threading) alongside lots of storage (you’ll need this). If you are using powerful software then unfortunately you may want to invest in around 32GB of RAM compared to the 16GB standard. While you don’t need to spend 2 thousand pounds on a super high end PC, the general rule is that a better PC will benefit you more. This is due to shorter waiting times, better performance, likelihood of less crashes too.

    • Photo: John Easton

      John Easton answered on 8 Nov 2024:

      Not necessarily – a lot of the overhead in games development comes from the tools and frameworks that modern games use. If you are using these frameworks then you need the compute power to do that. If you are not, then usually better coding will help overcome some of the performance issues. You need to decide where to invest your time though. In many cases, throwing more / better hardware at the problem will improve things but it may just be masking another problem in the code.

    • Photo: Paul Stallard

      Paul Stallard answered on 21 Nov 2024:

      It’s always nice to have a more powerful computer, but it might not be necessary. It really depends what you have already, and what type of games you want to develop. High speed 3D graphics are compute intensive, but other strategy-type games can get by with a lot less.

      There’s a commercial consideration too, if you ever intend to sell your games. If the game needs a very high-end machine you are severely limiting your potential market. You might be better off (literally!) spending time optimising the code and/or removing some complex parts of the game so it runs on a wider range of computers.

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