Help a noob thread

"danknugz" wrote:
Will this suffice for simple starter noob development? Just want to create some simple shapes and polygons (someone suggested blender and UE4) and tinker around, get used to the environment, and just want to make sure I am starting off on the right foot with the right tools.

Any computer made in the last 10 years is sufficient for simple shapes and polygons. UE4 and or Blender probably require a bit more power, but not a lot. Your setup should be perfectly adequate. However, if you want a really smooth experience I would double the memory and ensure you're booting from an SSD drive.

Great, thanks!

That GPU looks pretty weak. Sure, you can do some simple demos using it (you can even on Intel), but high-end stuff like UE4 will probably be a slide-show. Unity works better on low-end hardware, so you may be able to use that.

That said, you should download the software and see if it runs fast enough for your purposes. If you are just testing with simple cubes and stuff like that, then almost any modern PC can handle that. Then when your project gets more complex, you can look into upgrading.

"cybereality" wrote:
That GPU looks pretty weak.

Actually, looking at this, I would concur. However, you don't need a high end video card either, even for basic development with Unreal / Unity.

If you take a look here you can pretty easily find cards that run in the $100-$150 range that will be suitable. Both the Radeon HD 7850 & GeForce GTX 750 cards look fine. However, while buying a card for development I would strongly recommend finding one that supports at least triple monitor output. Simply having three connectors on the back doesn't necessarily imply that it will drive three monitors at once.

Triple monitor is important because you want to devote (at least) one monitor to development, and then have one monitor output driving the rift, and the last driving a monitor which is cloning the Rift output. There are lots of times when you want to iterate on some piece of content in non-Rift mode, and switching around cables constantly is a pain. Even when working with Rift mode output, it's frequently easier to view the output on a monitor rather than in the device itself for quick tests or checks.

For hardware I tend to try to keep it balanced, not too high so that I don't make games the are unplayable for the average gamer, but not so low I can't properly test the game. It is nice though having a slightly older computer, it limits how over ambitious I get with projects.

@Sqorck: Right. My dev machine at home is getting pretty old now (Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz, GTX 470 SLI) but it's still fine for development. It's also good to have a lower spec machine to test on. Probably build a better machine at some point, but I'll still keep the old one around for testing.

I'm (seriously) considering a Mac Pro for exhibitions next year.
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/mac-pro
Would love to test one. A "bit" expensive to just leap in, untested.
With bootcamp, the OSX port doesn't have to be ready, although of course, one can always hope.

We also have Mac Pros for the graphic designers here but I dont think I'd get away with using their in the morning to dev with :D

This GPU is really weak but hey I cant really complain if it is just what I have at work. I am trying to put off building a PC until I at least get the DK2, if not for mantle or some other solution that effectively utilizes SLI or some other form of GPU load balancing for the Rift. I think that is absolutely necessary for CV1 if it is going to demand such high FPS. But right now I just want to get my feet wet! Thanks for the help so far.

if the system is(somehow) too slow, try using some of the earlier 3D games as a base to demo until the update/upgrade is finished, or the compression issue is done

I got a new laptop from work (unexpected), here are the specs

intel core i7-4600M @ 2.90 ghz
4 gb ddr5
AMD Radeon HD 8790M

Hopefully this Radeon can handle some low level stuff better than the Radeon HD 7470 in the desktop. Just concerned about the 4 GB RAM. I guess this is good to get my feet wet with.