Here's something legendary for today... :D

Hello people... Form that smiley, you're probably guessing I did something insane...

...And I sure did! Long story short, I decided to trial Unity 4.6.1 on my Dell Mini 910, aka. a netbook...
So, the specs of this thing? For those who don't own one of these, here you go:

Dell Inspiron Mini 910 Spec List:
CPU: Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
GPU: Intel GMA 950 166MHz (On Intel GME945 Express Chipset, Shader Model 2/OpenGL 1.4 max)

NOTE: I can technically use GMABooster to up the clockrate, but I didn't bother with that... ​

RAM: 1GB 2GB DDR2 Memory
OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP3 Windows 7 Home Premium SP1
Actual SSD Size: 16GB

In other words, not what you would normally use for a dev machine... The result? Not what I expected, it actually ran on a small project really well!

Here's the "mighty" Dell Mini 9 running Unity! One thing to note though; because I am at the moment trialling Unity, the install isn't running form the SSD, it's on the USB as detailed above. Likewise, startup time was a bit long...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2tqYgzg1_lWeGhubEZ1ZXdHX2M/preview

I give a bit of a commentary, so feel free to grab some earbuds and listen.

UPDATE: I went and did it again... and got unity 5.x working! See here for more details: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-x-on-an-intel-atom.409359/
I never expected the day I would see unity 5.x fire up happy as Larry on my Dell Mini 9!

 

Ok, new update; I am now in the process of moving the install to my netbook's SSD (This means returning the license, uninstalling Unity, then doing the whole process again, only on the SSD drive... )

 

EDIT: Looks like Unity itself hogs space a bit (4.9GB just for Unity!) but I did find a good way to cut back the installation; just dump MonoDevelop for Notepad++

Again, let me know your opinion. I am yet to fully kickstart a simple project, I might as well do it on this thing and see how it goes.

 

Lol... I wonder how Unity 5 would run on that piece of... hardware.

 

One thing first; guess where I'm typing this from...

Anyway, I was actually considering seeing how well Unity 5 would run, but judging by all the enhancements over the last few months, I don't think my Dell Mini 9 would have enough RAM to run everything in Unity 5. (I've had version 5 take up 500MB RAM on my main machine, so probably not the best idea to try it on this... )

I also found a weird bug; sometimes, when I select an object using Unity's diffuse shader, the object will suddenly turn green, and then after a while, back to it's actual color. Any idea what this could be?

And some statistics from the editor. Scene uses shuriken particles for the fire, a special fixed-function shader I wrote to use dot3, and it's not lightmapped. (Also has two vertex lights)

Not bad... I am yet to grab a scene from my main machine and test it here. Will report back soon.
EDIT: oh yea, don't worry about the number in the corner; that was to test script compilation speed.
EDIT2: Also don't worry about the clock; I just noticed it was showing 10:45 PM last night...

 

An intel pentium potato? A maxwell architecture toaster? An i7-core 16GHz abacus?

 

Oh yea, speaking of which; I also finished moving the installation to the SSD.

One thing's for sure, startup time's a little quicker. Saving scenes has jumped a huge notch though (It used to take about 10 seconds to save... it now takes 2 seconds to do so! )

EDIT: I also forgot to mention one thing; after re-installing Unity on the SSD, I went to activate... and it literally said "you're done!" instead of asking me to sign in, so Unity must have known that the license was once on such-and-such a machine. Talk about convenience!

The Dell Mini 9 above, aka. an Intel atom supernova.

 

Unity stores the license at C:\ProgramData\Unity. It never had a copy on the USB drive to begin with.

 

@Ryiah: Sorry to say this, but... ProgramData folder don't exist on XP! (Or maybe it's somewhere else, I honestly have no idea)
And I returned the license file before moving the installation, wouldn't that remove the license from the machine?

 

Try checking C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data. Otherwise I have no idea where they would store it or how they return the license.

 

Found it:

It's actually in "all users" which makes sense.

 

Those are basically the specs of my 2008 MacMini and it runs Unity 4.6.x fine, better than older versions of Unity in fact. It won't run Unity 5.x though.

 

Pretty much. It's a pitty though, since Unity 5 free's the only one with renderTextures... Doesn't matter all that much, since I have a main dev machine with the support.

EDIT: Also found out something a bit iffy; attempting to run in OpenGL mode throws an error: "GLSL support required" Since when did they remove ARB_Vertex/Fragment_Shader support?! I WANT IT BACK!!!

 

You probably have drivers written by Microsoft and bundled with Windows. Those lack support for OGL, even for dedicated graphic cards that definitely have it like GeForce. You need to install drivers from official Intel site.

 

Actually, the GMA950 doesn't have support for GLSL, only ARB_vertex_shader/ARB_fragment_shader, whereas DirectX support is shader model 2.

EDIT: I also mean't Unity removing support for ARB extensions, not Intel...

 

Hey people, will wake this up one more time to announce something; With a bit of reverse-engineering of the main unity cgincludes, I found an awesome way of doing multiple pixel lights in one pass! (works with vertex-lit mode too, believe it or not. ) I will be releasing more info later when I do some more testing.

 

Is that that setting that when turned up from the default (2 or 4) to say 12 or 16, brings a nearly empty project from >200fps to <90fps?

 

Heh... it was more like 120 down to 60 actually. I found though that I encountered register limits on the mini 9's SM2.0 card if I did more than 5, so... close, but no cigar!

One thing's for sure; it definitely saves on polys, since it's one pass... I guess I could have more than one pass, like one pass for the first four, and a second for the last four lights. There's only 8 OpenGL/DirectX lights in the array, unfortunately... I could easily feed my own lights array in though, judging by how it's made, so it's easy to extend it to something like 32 lights if I wanted to. (That would be a SM3.0 job however... )

 

You know why it runs great ? ITS CAUSE UNITY IS THE BOMMMMMMMMMMBBBB

 

Fair enough, we can all agree on that.

 

Good luck with that. I'm sure there's a lot of people who would greatly appreciate less crazy lighting

 

A little update; I became a madman again today, and got unity 5.x working on the laptop's new fresh windows 7 home install: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-x-on-an-intel-atom.409359/

I honestly didn't see it coming when I decided to try it today; RAM upgrades really can make a difference!

 

Damn clickbait threads.