If you're new to game development and 3D animation, what would your ideal system set up be?

[Un3Dreal (Andy Lauer)]

I would actually be using UE5, but I’m brand spankin new. I need to buy a system and want to know what you would buy, pc, laptop, both? What other hardware is needed and software? 32Gb ram, 64Gb, quad core, octo core? Etcetera…

[Everynone]

Desktop > Laptop. But you cannot (really shouldn’t) take the desktop on a train…

• are you going to work while moving around the country → laptop
• are you going to take advantage of the global pandemic and work from home, pantless → desktop

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Like this:

unreal 5 system requirements

One lucky young man! For a future-proof desktop: 8-12 core CPU: 5800x / 5900x (5950x if the budget allows it) minimum 32GB RAM, 3200 MHz will do fine a modern graphic card, a GeForce 3060, 3070, 3080 - depending on the budget / availability 2 NVMe SSDs with at least 1TB capacity each quality Gold+ rated power supply so none of the above fries Lots of good reading in this thread, too:

[Everynone]

What other hardware is needed

• chair, good non-gaming chair, a quality office chair; if you’re 20 now, you’ll be 40 at some point. Do yourself a favour
• a second screen, ignore the 165MHz 1ms gaming stuff. Good colour reproduction, 27+ inches, discard any 1080p screens immediately. The 21:9 & 32:9 are handy.

and software?

[Community List] Free Software Tools & Resources List

Please post links to any free resources you know of and if possible credit the creators. I (and any moderator that can spare some time) will add them to the list in very post. Special thanks to all the resource creators and the people who have submitted the links. There have been some great submissions since I last updated post, linkwill take you to the last one I added, so it’s worth foraging for anything past the link. Free Software: Game Engines https://www.unrealengine.com/ - The o…

[MrAlt]

When I recently built my PC, I sort of already knew what I wanted in the system and what it was going to be used for , but narrow down my search I went to https://www.cgdirector.com/pc-builder just get a little more clarity that I was heading in the right direction and staying in budget even the budget got really inflated after while.

I would say that would be a good start actually deciding if you want a dedicated desktop or laptop would be the first place to start then going from there. Good Luck

[Everynone]

You can also have a look at:

Logical Increments PC Buying Guide

…to get a decent understanding of the pricing ranges. The site is somewhat geared towards gaming rather than game-dev. So you could opt for double the RAM, higher tier CPU and a lower tier GPU instead.