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Godot on laptop using external GPU? Good idea? Bad idea? (reddthat.com)

submitted 1 year ago by bjfar@reddthat.com to c/gamedev@programming.dev

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So I'm looking for advice on external GPUs. I want to try out Godot, but I don't have a GPU. I don't think I've ever had a GPU in fact. I'm a software developer actually, python mostly, but I've never done GPU stuff in my work, and my PC gaming days were mostly prior to the existence of GPUs. So I'm way out of touch with them.

I do have a reasonable laptop that I've been using for dev stuff, a Dell XPS 9370 (build number from Dell is CNX37014), but it has no GPU, so I guess it won't be great for trying out 3D stuff in Godot. It does have thunderbolt ports though, so I think I can plug an external GPU into those? Anyone tried that kind of thing out? I'd rather fork out for an external GPU if that will work decently rather than try to build a whole new PC or something. I actually have no idea if there is a performance hit for the GPU being external, just heard they were a thing and trying to figure out if they are a viable option.

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[–] Marzepansion@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey, game dev here (well currently working for a company that works with many dev studios), graphics programmer in particular. It depends on what you want to do, is your primary usage going to be programming? You can get away with integrated graphics cards, as long as you stick to programmer-art quality level of environment details (which you would normally do anyway to test code).

You can get pretty far into the dev process with minimal need for a detailed 3D env.

There will be a perf hit for an external GPU just because of the physics involved (proximity and type of connection matters a lot in computers, this is why your CPU has L-caches on the cores).

I actually have a crap GPU always laying around because it's also the best to test out performance issues. Nothing drives you to improve perf than a choppy framerate ;)

Most of my colleagues in my previous company were rocking 960's or worse till last year, myself included. And we were a team of graphics programmers working on GPU driver-like software.

I'd say, try it out, download Godot and an example project, run it and see how well it performs. If the perf looks fine, congrats, it's a good idea. If the performance is bad, look at the quality of the example project and think "will I make anything visually more complex?" if not, congrats everything is good. Otherwise, well consider an external GPU if you think that's best.

I'd suggest getting a desktop though if you ever decide to keep going down the game dev line, just to keep upgrade costs low. I operate on a +-5 years cadence to modify parts, alternating between my CPU and GPU mainly. So I don't replace the entire thing, but in 2 years I'll be updating my CPU and in 4 it'll be my GPU. I also have a crap laptop for when I'm on the road, and use the desktop for my actual work. I can always remote desktop into my desktop if I need something with more power to compile or render.

To put your hardware in perspective, it would have beaten my desktop of 15 years ago and I was already doing game dev back then just fine. So you could definitely do game dev with it, the big question is "what type of game dev".

(sorry for the chaotic nature of this response, hope you got something helpful out of it)