Is a gaming machine better for software development?

Question

Is a gaming machine better for software development?

I have asked this in SO, to get answered by programmers, appologies if this is in the wrong place.

Answer 1

If you want to develop games, sure. I should know, I have experience on both.

Answer 2

I think so. I think the performance required for gaming will greatly help developers. Only overkill would be graphics, unless you use big rendering software, in which case RAM, graphics is a must.

Good CPU, Lots of fast RAM, and a fast HD will do you lots of good.

Answer 3

Unless you're programming something to do with graphics / game related, not necessarily. The video card is going to be underused otherwise. On the other hand gaming machines tend towards the high end making them ideal for many programming tasks.

Answer 4

Some attributes of gaming machines can help developers, like having a good deal of memory, or a quad core processor (so you can, respectively, run VMs without hassle, and compile faster).

But a fast GPU won't do you much good, so there's no point in spending much money on it. Unless you plan on developing or playing games, of course.

Summing up: if you plan on using the PC for fun, get a reasonable GPU. If you don't, skip it and keep the rest just like you would. You won't regret it.

Answer 5

A gaming machine without the fancy video card, I think that's more suitable for a programmer. (you can use the video card money to add more RAM for example)

Answer 6

I would say some aspects are the same between gaming machines and development machines, like large disks, a lot of memory, etc. So in that respect yes, a gaming machine would fit better than a low end desktop.

On the other hand, gaming machines tend to be tuned towards raw performance instead of robustness. A development machine often does not need a state of the art graphics card, nor does it want a RAID-0 to spead up the disk. If it crashes one disk you lose all your work, so RAID-1 would be much better. Same holds for memory, ECC (or what its called nowadays) is a bit slower but adds robustness.

One gotcha with powerful development machines is that they do not represent the non-functional requirements as to execution environment. If you are not aware of this enough your software will run slow on a "normal" machine because it ran great on your supercomputer :-) One take on this is that development machines should always be a tad slower than the target machines, but this cuts into your development time. A better solution is to have slower machines in the test environment and a few slower machines in the development lab.

Answer 7

What you'll need for software development is usually a machine with ample RAM, ample HDD space (and a fast HDD or set of HDDs to boot), a fast multi-core processor (very important if you're working with compiled languages, especially the likes of C++ which take a long time to compile compared to Java or C#) and preferably the ability to drive multiple monitors. For the latter, it's a case of the more the merrier as screen real estate is one of those things that you can never have enough of.

While a lot of this does indeed sound like the spec for a gaming machine due to its raw number crunching ability, the main difference is likely to be the graphics hardware. You don't need something that can render x million polygons per second on a single monitor if you're trying to drive 3x 24" monitors as 2D displays. In fact you probably don't want a usually rather noisy gamer spec video card that only shines when rendering 3D; you're more likely to get more out of a "pro" graphics card that can drive 4 monitors instead.

So yes, I'd think the spec is quite similar and there is a lot of overlap between the two but in the end a developer spec machine is not the same as a gaming rig.

Answer 8

NO.

1. CPU For software development, you need lots of cores. For gaming, you need fast but not necessarily many cores. This is slowly changing as newer games are being written to take advantage of multicore CPUs, but the general case is that most gaming machines focus on raw CPU power. For example, in my case, I'm an RoR developer, and during development I run: my editor, mongrel, solr, postgresql, and memcached. Most of the time I also have an open browser, a PDF editor, and iTunes.

2. RAM Most games will be OK with 2-3GB of RAM. For software development, especially web development - if you will be running multiple servers - you'll want at least 4GB, or even 8GB of RAM.

3. GPU Top-of-the-line graphics cards for gaming can cost $500 or more. For software development, you can get away with the cheapest GPU you can get. The only aspect of the video card you'll want to concern yourself with is the capability to handle multiple large monitors.

It will actually be helpful if your development machine is so crippled (gaming-wise) that you can't play the games you like to play on that machine. No distractions! :)

Answer 9

Gaming machines are great for everything except your wallet ;-)

Answer 10

Programming WPF Shader Effects is one of those particular tasks where a gaming machine can actually allow you to do more while not working in game-development. Also, GPGPU work may benefit from fast memory transfer and fast GPU.