Your Ultimate Workstation - Please Spec It!

xfx

Hello again,

Curious what TAOs take would be on Ultimate Workstations for 2 different disciplines

1. Ultimate Game Art Rig (Artists)
2. Ultimate Game Dev Rig (Programmers)

IOW: Spec your ultimate workstation for either of the above without restriction (to amount, level, or manufacturer)

1. OS
2. CPU
3. GPU
4. RAM
5. Hard Drives (type, capacity, configuration)
6. Software (anything/everything preferred to be resident)
   
   • Authoring
   • Coding
   • Middleware tools/plugins
   • Game engines

Please feel free to elaborate on the reasons behind your choices or add any categories not outlined above.
Not meant to be a rathole debate, just seeking a variety of opinions.

Admins: If this belongs in a different forum, by all means please move.

Thank you
--
Jeffery A. Williams
Lead Digital Content Design/Creation
Game Development Experience
Developer Relations Division
Software Services Group
Intel Corporation

ZacD

Ultimate Game Art Rig

OS
Windows 10

CPU - Depending on what form factor and software I would be using mostly. I have a love for tiny ITX builds so that would be tempting. 
5960X or 6700k or Xeon E5-2687W v3 or two Xeon E5-2687W v3 

GPU - Probably wouldn't do SLI since not many art applications take advantage of it
980ti or Titan X

RAM
64 GB of the fastest ram the motherboard supports

STORAGE 
Super fast, high capacity PCIe or M.2 SSDs with 2x 4 TB HDDs for backups.

SOFTWARE - Just my preferences 
SOFTIMAGE
SUBSTANCE DESIGNER
SUBSTANCE PAINTER
UNREAL ENGINE 4
PHOTOSHOP
ZBRUSH
3DCOAT

DISPLAYS - How did you leave this out? Monitors are just as important as everything else. 3 monitors with a TV wall mounted above them
3x ASUS ROG PG279Q (as long as I didn't get one with bad blacklight bleed and poor quality control)
or
3x  Dell UltraSharp U3014 (if I don't plan on playing any games and want better quality control)
and this with either one 
1x LG Electronics 65EF9500 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD Flat Smart OLED TV

And of course a high end Wacom Tablet. 

Schultzie

For an ultimate monitor I'd love one of these:
http://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/cg318-4k/

Bek

Game Art rig:

1. OS - Manjaro Linux (Host), Windows 8.1 or 10 (VM Guest to run windows applications 'natively' in linux)
   
2. CPU - Probably a high-end Skylake GPU or anything tried and tested with a hardware passthrough. if we're being totally insane, a workstation using two physical CPU's if one can be passed through entirely to the guest.
   
3. GPU - 1x AMD card, whatever is the latest/most stable on linux, probably a 390x at the moment. Passed to the guest for native 3d accel. performance in the windows VM it doesn't really matter, whatever high end GPU.
   
4. RAM - No specific requirements here, 32gb would be plenty for 2016. Enough to share between the Host and Guest anyway.
   
5. Hard Drives (type, capacity, configuration) SSD for the OS's and critical software, mechanical for mass storage. Possibly in a raid if there's no network backup in place.
   
6. Software (anything/everything preferred to be resident)
   
   • Authoring - modo, substance painter, xnormal would be the critical mentions. Also photoshop, zbrush, krita...
     
   • Coding - maybe python at some point, but that's not really my area. General needs (cfg editing, html, basic scripts) would be covered by open source stuff like mousepad.
     
   • Middleware tools/plugins - Tonnes of scripts and kits for modo, Arma 3 Tools (steam), nDo, handplane (freeware)
     
   • Game engines - toolbag 2, Unreal Engine 4 / Unity 5, because why not?
     

The only other 'game art' hardware mentions would be an IPS monitor (or whatever technology has good colour reproduction) and a tablet (wacom or otherwise) for sculpting in zbrush or painting/drawing in 2d. Some people also use tablets for navigation in 3d software instead of the mouse but I'm yet to try that extensively.

xfx

Thanks, keep 'em coming

Curious though...
1. Why no Quadro GPU?
2. Why no Autodesk (Max/Maya)?
3. Is Skylake preferred over Xeon?

RobeOmega

xfx said:

Thanks, keep 'em coming

Curious though...
1. Why no Quadro GPU?
2. Why no Autodesk (Max/Maya)?
3. Is Skylake preferred over Xeon?

1) A lot of the software in games runs worse on Quadro cards as these are built for offline rendering rather than real time rendering.
2)  Modo is becoming much and much more popular by game devs if what I see on Polycount is to be believed.
3)  This may not be 100% accurate but as far as I remember in games higher clock speed and sometimes less cores can give more frames a second for games than CPU's with more cores. If I remember correctly this was looked at one time using benchmarks. Maybe I can find the video if you like.

xfx

^^^ Thank you

ZacD

Lots of games and applications only really take advantage of 2-4 cores, except for baking and rendering. If you do a lot of baking and rendering, the extra cores are awesome to have, but not completely necessary. Because of the huge price gap between Quardro and Geforce or Xeon and i7, many artists like to go the most cost effective route, and just upgrade more often.  Max and Maya are still the most popular applications, especially in large studios, but for personal use, and smaller studios, Modo is a great option, and is arguably better than Max and Maya in many ways, but there is some draw backs, and a studio isn't going to spend the money to switch, and to develop new tools required for their pipeline. 

xfx

^^^ Thanks again.

How about UV tools?
I'm a long time UVLayout fan, what's the latest/greatest solution?

Bek

I still unwrap in modo. IPackThat is becoming popular for packing though. Personally I like how modo does a lot of things (uv'ing included) and I also like keeping the majority of the work in the one application - a simpler pipeline is just more reliable. Jumping around applications too much can add extra unnecessary work, so I try to limit that.

RobeOmega

In terms of UV's most people usually unwrap in their application such as Blender, Modo, Max, Maya and so on, there are some exceptions to this such as headus. Personally I use IPackThat for the layout of my UV's because I can get very accurate padding distribution opposed to getting everything roughly there with hand packing. That and it takes less time.

Ryusaki

The ultimate workstation would be a TILE-Gx multicore processor with lots of cores. 
I want one of those.
Everything else is just mediocre.

PolyHertz

OS:  Windows 7 Pro
CPU:  6700K
GPU:  980ti
RAM:  64GB DDR4
SSD:  2x 2TB Samsung Pro in a RAID1
Monitor: 2x Dell UP2516D displays.
Optical:  Blu-Ray burner (my preferred way of doing long-term backups)
Software: 3DSMax, Maya, 3D-Coat, ZBrush, Photoshop, Clip Paint Studio, Unreal Engine 4, Substance Designer, IPackThat.

skyline5gtr

I feel like this is a lottery thread lol

xfx

skyline5gtr said:

I feel like this is a lottery thread lol

Kinda 

RobeOmega

1. Ultimate Game Art Rig (Artists)

Warning: Assuming build assumes infinite money. 8 SSD's may not be a normal sensible choice

1. OS- Windows 10

Reason: Windows has always been my favorite OS and Windows 10 is my favorite version of it.

1. CPU- 5930K or 6700K

Reason: Trade off between the higher clock speed and the cores.

1. GPU- NVIDIA GTX 980TI

Reason: Currently the best graphics card for games in my opinion.

1. RAM- 128 Gigabytes

Reason: If DDR4 128 gigs can be put into one machine.

1. Hard Drives- Maybe something like 8 1TB Samsung 840 should do the trick

Reason: Very overkill but the restrictions were unlimited so I figured why not!

1. Software - Blender, Modo, UE4, Cryengine, Adobe Photoshop, Quixel Suite, Xnormal, Unity, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, World Machine with Geoglyph add on, IPackThat, Adobe Illustrator, ZBrush

Reason: Some of this is software I currently own and use and the rest is software I would acquire if I had the money to buy them.