Current Hardware for 3d-game creation (2021)

goekbenjamin

i am currently looking for better hardware since mine is a bit weak and software starts to lag.
Since my knowledge regarding the hardware is very limited, I hope you guys could lead me in the right direction ?

I make use of
Maya,
ZBrush,
Substance Painter,
Marmoset,
Unreal.

Creating garments, characters, accessories, leads to very dense and highpoly models to sculpt on...and as said my current setup is somewhat slow/weak.

my current specs:
cpu: intel core i5 7500 , 4 x 3.4GHz
ram: 16GB kingston predator i think
gpu: nvidia geforce 1060 6GB
motherboard: asus (this is surely outdated because of the newer generations of CPUs i think) [Micro ATX]
--------------------

i am aiming to get an AMD-CPU (not as pricey as intel, I dunno)
my budget would be around 2.000 - 2.500 €

the question is: does it even make sense to get slightly better components than I have now regarding this budget, or should I wait until I have a higher budget?
i don't do RENDERINGs a lot if that would help to decide? (like do I need many cpu cores and smaller clock rate od less cpu cores but higher clock rates?)

i am really unsure about that topic...

pior

Well, the one non-intuitive thing to keep in mind is that, if I am not mistaken, both Zbrush and UE4 are very dependent on the CPU.

UE4 because the asset browser and the shader compilation process seem to be really quite poorly optimized (the ingame performance is fantastic of course, but the in-editor behavior leaves quite a bit to be desired imho) ; and Zbrush because it is not even using the graphics card for anything 3D.

So one thing you could do on the cheap would be to upgrade the CPU and the RAM to the maximum that is compatible with your motherboard. Since your MB is likely old-ish, these components may not be too expensive and would allow you to boost performance quite a bit for these two apps. That wouldn't be comparable to full-on upgrade of course, but that would essentially turn your machine into the high end rig one could have bough around the time you bought yours.

I'll leave it to other more knowledgable users to discuss the more usual upgrade path you could take

goekbenjamin

pior said:

Well, the one non-intuitive thing to keep in mind is that, if I am not mistaken, both Zbrush and UE4 are very dependent on the CPU.

UE4 because the asset browser and the shader compilation process seem to be really quite poorly optimized (the ingame performance is fantastic of course, but the in-editor behavior leaves quite a bit to be desired imho) ; and Zbrush because it is not even using the graphics card for anything 3D.

So one thing you could do on the cheap would be to upgrade the CPU and the RAM to the maximum that is compatible with your motherboard. Since your MB is likely old-ish, these components may not be too expensive and would allow you to boost performance quite a bit for these two apps. That wouldn't be comparable to full-on upgrade of course, but that would essentially turn your machine into the high end rig one could have bough around the time you bought yours.

I'll leave it to other more knowledgable users to discuss the more usual upgrade path you could take

awesome thanks for your input pior!
forgot to mention that I plan to buy a new MB too because that one is "really old" and the amount of ram-socket are rare too..i guess only two? also the cpu socket is old...
that are good points regarding cpu + ram...since i don't render that much, I guess my GPU is actually okayish for SP/Marmoset i think?

poopipe

5800/5900x and a 3070/3080 with 32gb (leaving space for 32 more) would be a fairly good place to be. 

The extra cores in my 5950x are of dubious real world benefit and outside of processing genuinely huge datasets I rarely go past 32gb of ram usage. I'd suggest that the money is better spent elsewhere

goekbenjamin

regarding the CPU question and what ZBrush uses when is explained pretty good in that video which helped me a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glxwAFEuFFg