Core I5 Or I7 For Game Design

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I'm thinking of buying a new iMac (non-retina). For an extra $200.00 is it worth getting the i7 over the i5 for game development with Unity?
3.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz
3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz
You need the fastest CPU money can buy for game development imo. Faster compilation and faster baking means more iteration.
The i7's benefit is it will automatically overclock itself a little, has a much larger cache (repetitive tasks are done faster) and has 8 threads.

i5 probably is equal to i7 for gaming and general tasks, but will pull ahead noticeably for rendering and intensive calculation. If that $200 can be spent toward a 500gb samsung evo SSD then that's probably the better productivity boost if you've not got an SSD.
hippo is right. faster is always bester
I think generally, you will find it doesnt matter, but for some of those intensive baking operations it will come in handy.
I opted for the i5 on mine under the presumption that it would be handy to have a machine closer to the average for testing performance. Also: I am poor. My philosophy tends to be that buying medium-performance machines more frequently pays off better in overall performance over time than one suped-up rig in a blue moon (if this is a choice you have to make). An affordable iMac in 2-3 years is going to be way more powerful than your i7 today. Let's not forget these machines can't be upgraded very far.
That's never worked out for anyone. But saving some bucks never hurt
It's worked out okay for me, but I'm not doing anything too hardcore with the machine.
Thanks guys.
@hippocoder The i5 also has turbo boost (will overclock itself). As for the SSD. I was thinking of getting the 3TB Fusion Drive. Isn't that lot better than a standard Serial ATA Drive? Also 500GB isn't enough for me and the next step up is a 1TB Flash drive, an extra $850.00. Way too much.
I second getting an SSD.
A must have for Unity development.
The Fusion Drive is a hybrid. It combines a multi-terabyte magnetic drive with a 128GB SSD. It works by transferring files between the HDD and SSD portions based on access frequency and free space. As long as you keep your most frequently accessed files within ~128GB, the drive achieves more speed than a traditional HDD. The more you go beyond that size though the more the speed degrades.
AnandTech's benchmarks, linked below, show that it is approximately 40% faster than a traditional HDD but a full SSD is even faster. My recommendation would be to go with an ~512GB SSD and buy an HDD as a secondary drive to hold all your less accessed programs and files. Unless your frequently accessed files is within the ~128GB, you'll probably want better.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6679/a-month-with-apples-fusion-drive/6
I use a 128gb SSD and a 3tb hybrid. The hybrid only has 8 or 16gb of SSD, but it still leaves the mechanical drive in the computer next to it in its dust (though, of course, having an SSD for the system drive could have a large impact on that - the impression comes from the fact that after the system is all loaded, games installed on the hybrid drive load far faster than the other computer).
I have a Samsung 850 pro and it's outta this world.
I have never had a processor that was not an i7. I cannot imagine life without one. If you must, save up that money to get that i7. With game development, it is very likely you will have a lot of applications open and you need that speed to efficiently handle those tasks.
you may as well have said "I haven't been using computers very long", because that's all I heard
Fast CPU is definitely worth the money by the way. I agree with you there. And so is a SSD.
What are you guys all doing that you need such a beastly CPU to function? I have one and I love it, but I was getting by without qualms on a Q8200 until just a year ago, and there's a Q6600 next to me right now that's still kicking on quite well. And my MacBook Pro is of a similar vintage...

Deon-Cadme and Cogent like this.
Faster baking and compiling for business use. As a hobbyist I've been satisfied with lower-end CPUs such as my current Phenom II X4 965. Paying $80 for a CPU was far better for me than a couple hundred.
Haha I got into computer science almost 5 years ago!
Yep, that's almost the maximum possible for the I7
I'm just teasing you, I've been programming since 1983 :|
What do you use your computer for? How complex are your Unity projects? Do you develop high quality art or play lots of games (what games)?
Just my personal opinion, i7 is a huge overkill for most people, the same with 16+ GB of ram... The i5 CPU:s are typically adequate unless you render lots of videos etc... YouTube got lots of excellent videos that explain the main differences between an i5 and a i7. Watch and consider what fits your usage habits the best.

I personally recommend SSD drives, I got one as my main harddrive (for OS, programs and games) and it probably saves me many hours per year because it killed boot times, delays when starting programs and other tasks that do intensive read/write operations on my harddrive.
It is a good idea though to complement one of these with a normal, secondary harddrive for all your project files, pictures, videos etc.

Just don't overspend on RAM and consider carefull which graphics card you need.
I guess you don't do too much enlighten or baking or compiling of larger projects - that sort of thing really chews through processors. I wonder though if you're just numb to the pain of all those little bits of waiting
Well, if you want to get serious, why not build a separate, dedicated computer for that stuff
Lightmap baking, compressing iOS/Android textures (this can be painfully slow with lots of big textures), and doing builds (although that's more IO-bound)
Also, Monodevelop...
If you will be buy a Mac desktop really the money is not problem, you can have better hardware with same money if buy a windows PC desktop, if you will be dev light graphic games as 2D or light 3D a i5 will be work fine, Unity run fine in moderate hardware. And at end the Mac is a deluxe platform but not better, possibly the only think for use Mac that justify the money spend would be can video edition or dev apps for Mac and IOS.

Last edited: Jan 13, 2015
I'm hitting the 16 GB RAM ceiling daily just by casually browsing.
I bought RAM when it was cheap. Wish I had 32 GB. Now DDR3 prices have more than doubled in price.

Waiting for DDR4 prices to come down so I can build a Skylake/Cannonlake system.
More important is the GPU if you are buying a tablet convertible or a laptop you always, always want to newer GPU. The i5 and the i7 will not make a whit of difference compared to the GPU. You always want to checkout WindowsRT tablets for less than $100 as your test bed.
In summary: you sound like someone to me that is stretching financially to buy the i5. So buy the i5 and get the latest GPU - you really have to watch the GPU. Ads used to emphasize the GPU now you have to research it.

Use the $100 / $200 you save to buy a sub $200 WinRT tablet or you can even buy sub $100 WinRT and Android tablets with that $200. You can get 2 good test 7" 1024x600 tablets, an extra $100 to $150 buys you 2 10.1" tablets. Don't waste money on the latest and greatest when the prior iteration is what has the best value for the money in the here and now. Realistic testing is a much better investment for someone than saving a cumulative 30 minutes over the course of a year on light map baking with an i7.

If you buy brand names when you don't have to you are paying a premium so that someone can salt their eggs with gold flakes.
Hmm, I have 8Gb of RAM and never desired more. I do video editing too...
Eric5h5

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That's unlikely; I have 8GB for fairly heavy-duty usage and haven't yet seen any need to get more. The OS attempts to keep everything in RAM as much as possible, so free RAM isn't any indication of whether you're hitting any ceilings or not. What you need to look at is memory pressure and swap used. If there's a lot of swap then that's an indication that you have memory problems.
--Eric
I totally agree with Eric5h5. I do videos, audio recording with 16+ tracks and 40+ plugins running simultaneously with 8Gb RAM. No way using a browser will need that much memory unless you have like 200 tabs open.
Really? I atm have over 800 tabs open in Firefox and it is below 3GB (on Linux).
I for myself would take an I7 with the best graphics card I could get (parallel number crunching stuff...).
Hm, I'm using Chrome and around 100 tabs maxes out the 16 GB. Each tab is taking approximately 100 MB but depending on the contents some pages require more than 1 GB.
Might just try out going back to Firefox if it's less memory hungry.
Note that I reload the tabs from earlier sessions, so probably most are not loaded in the same way as if I had accessed them today. But from the time it takes to open and close Firefox I can say that it stores/caches a lot of data.
Maybe my plugins help, I have AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery and such, so most pages cannot load their buggy JS or huge networks of trackers that would maybe allocate tons of data in the background.
Well, there's really no reason to have 100 tabs open, unless you like to have to search for minutes every time you want to go back to a tab. Use Favorites and close 95 of them!
I just did a small comparison opening the same 18 tabs in Firefox and Chrome. Chrome takes 2 GB whereas Firefox takes about 440 MB. But it's not an honest comparison because I have several extensions in Chrome (including Session Buddy and Evernote to manage my tabs, jerotas) while Firefox is a clean installation. I will do some more tests to see if a particular extension is the culprit.
Allright, Session Buddy & Evernote, I'll keep those in mind. I'm cool with bookmarks / favorites. It helps not to take up too much memory too by never having more than like 5 tabs open. I'm just "tidy" that way. I'm one of those people that never has more than like 4 programs open and a *very* clean desktop with only a dozen items or so. It's the only way I can be efficient and stay sane. There's not really a downside to working that way for me. But it doesn't mean you have to work the same way
Haha, I'm pretty much the opposite.
Test results opening 16 Wikipedia pages. Figures refer to Total RAM on Chrome's Stats for Nerds page

Chrome + 6 Extensions (adblock, better history, evernote, ghostery, google dictionary, session buddy)
1,252,991k

Chrome + No extensions
836,852k

Firefox + No extensions
333,904k
Since I worked at a company with Linux desktops I got another working style. On Linux you can have multiple desktops, and (almost) all stuff is still open after a reboot (but we let the PCs running all the time at that company just to be sure and no wait for boot in the morning).
- 1 desktop is machine learning, so some code IDEs, console with many tabs, other editors, Browser, PDFs, ...
- 1 desktop for game dev stuff, IDEs, console with many tabs, ...
- and for projects x,y and z each a desktop
So I have many programs open even if I just logged in after booting.
For a PC having many things open saves a lot of time, because each desktop is ready to start (e.g. each console tab is in the right folder and remembers all previous commands,...). If the OS is built for that it is awesome, but Windows is not.

For Browser tabs I agree, my 800 are too many (I should probably reset each time I reach 200). But 100 are easily manageable. My tabs are no chaos, there are like 50 machine learning tabs in a row, then 50 game dev, then 20 TVs of which I want to buy one, ,... But yes, I should look for a plugin to group them into a hierarchy.

Bookmarks are no option for my usage, I bookmark important things, I have many thousand. So everything that is only temporarily important does just get a tab and no bookmark.

Last edited: Jan 13, 2015
Windows not all bad in my experience - aside from this memory consumption issue. I'm using Windows 7 x64. At night I put it into sleep mode (not in hibernation mode) with all programs running. Saves quite a bit of energy. Next day I press a key on the keyboard and within 1 second it's ready to use.I was in that same situation to the point bookmarks became meaningless. So I started using Evernote, which allows you to save whole pages. You can organize and search through them for easier retrieval. An added benefit is that some pages may be removed from the internet but you still have them archived.
Windows got much better but is not on the same level. I have yet to see the Windows that you can fully use a full year without reboot and without performance degradation. And many Windows updates require a reboot. Also if I code something wrong and manage to crash the OS, all Apps are still open after a reboot except maybe the crashing one, while on Windows everything is gone.
And in sleep mode it still uses my notebook battery so it can die if I'm on the road for longer.
But all this does not matter because I need a console that is powerful to be efficient.Thanks. But since I mostly use Linux this is not an option. Anybody using Nevernote or one of the other many clones? Or is the Evernote web interface good?
Haven't tried the web client. The old one was unusably slow in my experience, but I see they've created a new one. https://evernote.com/evernote/guide/web/ It looks similar to the Windows client but I don't if its performance holds up.
Back to the original topic, is RAM really deemed of such a low priority in game development? As far as I can tell Unity 4 can max out its max 4 GB pretty quickly. Occasionally I have multiple Unity editors open. And with Unity 5's 64-bit editor there's an even bigger potential memory consumption. Add in the other memory hungry content creation programs such as Maya, Photoshop, Substance Painter, Audition you may have running in the background I tend to suggest not to skimp on both quantity and quality of RAM - when it can be had for cheap .
im

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i7 > i5 (i7 support hyperthreading and while not like another core, it does make a difference)
16gb > 8gb (never can have enough memory helps when you want to run multiple instances, while current unity3d only uses 4gb you want more!, about 2gb for windows, about 2gb for other stuff. that sort of brings you to 8gb and you want more for multiple instances and other developer tools that you may be running at the same time)

ssd > hd (put system on ssd, put program on hd, put data on some other harddisk, put scratch on some other harddisk, put most used stuff on some other ssd)

and get best gpu that you can afford (personally i prefer ati > nvidia cause of people having nothing but problems with number of games with nvidia drivers and cause it looks to me like you get more bang for the buck with ati)
The way I see it, if you are planning on working on it every day for the next couple of years, for hours, then even a small performance improvement has a cumulative big impact on your life. Saving 5 seconds on a single compile is not worth $200. Saving 5 second on 10000 compiles accumulates to 14 hours, and those $200 look like a bargain.
So I would chose one or the other based on what kind of utilization you expect out of that machine.
@goldbug : Sorry, but no. You can't say that 5 seconds matter, without context. Whether something takes 2 or 7 seconds to compile is important. Whether it takes 1 hour or 1 hour and 5 seconds does not matter.
Let's get some things straight here:
1. 100 MHz more won't do S***. It's the kind of difference that you only see in benchmarks. If some process takes unbearably long with the i5, it would take unbearably long with the i7. The slightly higher CPU clock alone does not justify the 200$ price increase.
2. Hyperthreading is something really cool, IF it's used appropriately. Before buying an i7, check how many stages of your development process really benefit from it. It could save you 200 bucks, which you could spend elsewhere.
3. Compilation times aren't necessarily bottle-necked by CPU performance. Back when I compiled Android, the IO performance was the bottleneck. HDDs, even SSDs were bottlenecking the process. It's the kind of thing you ideally use a huge ramdisk for. However, consider that SSDs speed up almost any process. Other than the 100MHz or HT, they will (as in: definitively) give you a tangible performance boost.
I second @Neoku here. If performance is so important to you, don't buy an iMac. While Apple produces high quality products, they sell them at ridiculous prices. You pay A LOT(!) for the design and the branding. Neither of which will do anything to help you during development (other than possibly inflating your ego).
Why not just buy a PC? You could choose an Intel Xeon CPU then. The Xeon's are their Workstation/Server line CPUs and basically bridge the gap between the i5 and i7 series. You have the slightly lower clocking speeds of the i5's, but Hyperthreading, while not paying quite as much as for an i7.
I wonder if anyone is using aHacintosh for Unity game development.
How is it connected? To a Mac or Windows machine?
You guys with hundreds of gibberish tabs consider this more efficient than clearly indexed and sorted bookmarks? And you're sure you're productive?
Thanks for all the help.
Currently I am on a late-2009 27" iMac 3.06 Ghz Intel Core Duo, with 4GB FFR3 ram, 1TB HD, and the video card is a ATI Radeon HD 4670 256 MB.

There are two reasons I want to upgrade:
1. Most new 3D games need at least 512MB vram. And I want to max their settings out and be ready for the future. That's why I want the 4GB vram video option.

2. I don't do any video work and my current game is a light abstract board game but the objects are 3D. The most apps I may have open at one time are Unity Editor, Monodevelop, Cheetah 3D or Pixelmator. I never seem to run out of ram even with only 4GB. Building my game in Unity does not take so long. But Archiving the Xcode project (so I can drop the executable in TestFlight) takes a damn long time. My project is small and it makes me worry that any bigger games I may make may take forever to build/archive.

But overall booting the OS, starting up Unity, and Xcode, etc. are all a bit sluggish and I would like a speedup overall. I hear this is the kind of thing and building/compiling is where a SSD plus the 4-core i7 is much better than the 2-core i5.
It's in a Windows laptop, connected by a SATA 3.
[OT]
For 800 yes, for 100 no.
Not for very temporary/temporal infos. E.g. I don't want to bookmark all TVs I may buy, but I could.
But let's say I have 8 Java class docs open and some forum posts related to my problem. I don't want to bookmark specific classes, I can bookmark the Java doc index, but classes are too specific to the problem I have now.

And sometimes even the order of the tabs matter. That is hard to index. I have machine learning tabs related to Theano and dropout, but dropout related to a specific problem. And before them are some papers that let me investigate that. That would be hard to index so that I find this specific group again (and not other Theano links or other papers with similar content). The important ones get bookmarked, but the ones I currently use stay open.

But to each his own. I probably just work on too many things in parallel.
[/OT]
Anyone can work on many things in parallel, it's generally why not a great deal of stuff gets finished.
@goldbug made it pretty clear that he's not talking about 5 seconds, though. He's talking about the total time you'll waste in little, 5 second increments spread out over far longer time frames. With that in mind, it doesn't matter if a given 5 seconds is at the end of 2 seconds or 2 hours, the contribution to our productivity is identical. (The fact that we humans intuitively think otherwise is a documented irrationality.)
This bit I agree with, on the proviso that you're not targeting Mac or iOS with whatever you're making. The new Visual Studio CE and UnityVS are a huge part of my reasoning for this. You can get better tools, far cheaper. Why would you not take advantage of that?
Plus, iMacs aren't upgradable. No big deal when it's new and shiny, but it pushes the initial price up (because you have to account for what you think you might need in a couple of years) and brings useful lifetime down (because in 4 years you'll be buying a new one, rather than upgrading a couple of components and sallying forth).

I say all of this despite being a happy* iMac user at work and a happy MacBook Pro user at home. They definitely have their value, but performance on a budget is not it.

* Mostly... haha. My work iMac is currently costing me significantly in productivity, as the OS X partition decided not to boot, and the repair tools have taken out the rest of the machine instead of repairing anything. Support says to back up my files (which I can't access... so I'm lucky I already had one anyway) and re-format, which would be fine except it means I'm at least a full day away from being productive with it again...
Right, which is why you most likely will want a real SSD for your primary drive and have the hybrid or a normal HDD for your secondary. You can still stick with only the hybrid, but it won't have quite the performance of a real SSD. Especially if you use more than ~128GB of applications and files.

Last edited: Jan 14, 2015